Considered by some critics as mainly an ardent advocate of the realistic approach to literature, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen's role as a scholar and critic of European literature is also significant. Boyesen was in many respects an anomaly among writers generally designated as realists in nineteenth-century American literature. He was a novelist whose first work in fiction derived from his Norwegian background and whose later work was in the stream of American realism; he was a poet whose verse was an expression of his evolutionary beliefs; and, overall, he was best known as a critic who directed American literary taste and interest to the great European realists.

Central to Boyesen's outlook as well as to his introspection was the fact that he was an emigrant from Norway. He was never totally at home in America and sometimes even saw himself as a transitional person never completely at home anywhere...