Johan Borgen was a prolific writer in many genres. He wrote some two thousand articles about literature and twenty thousand about art, motion pictures, theater, and television. He published many collections of short stories and was proclaimed a master of the form. He established himself as a leading Scandinavian novelist with Lillelord (1955; translated, 1982); his innovative style in later novels, such as Jeg (1959; translated as The Scapegoat, 1993), inspired some young authors to experiment with modernism. He was also an editor of an important literary journal, a sought-after theater director, and, in his later years, a beloved radio personality. Though Borgen was a central figure in Norwegian literature for much of the twentieth century and won many national and international prizes, he is relatively unknown in the English-speaking world because little of his voluminous work has been translated into English.

Like other Norwegian writers who came of age during the...