Ole Edvart Rölvaag is a unique figure in American literature. Although he was born in Norway and wrote in his native language, his seven novels are distinctly American in flavor and theme. His major contribution to fiction is a trilogy-- Giants in the Earth (1927), Peder Victorious (1929), and Their Fathers' God (1931)--which brings to life the experiences of Norwegian immigrant settlers on the South Dakota prairie during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

What Rölvaag's admirers find most praiseworthy about his work is its truthful representation of the whole immigrant experience. It has become commonplace to observe, as Vernon Parrington did in his introduction to the second American edition of Giants in the Earth (1929), that the novels are unusual among those depicting the westward movement because of their psychological realism. Rölvaag perceived that for the immigrants there were not just two...