The Swedish author Pär Fabian Lagerkvist (1891-1974) was concerned with the meaning of life in a world without God and the existence of good and evil in such a world. Leif Sjöberg, in Pär Lagerkvist summarized the man: "Pär Lagerkvist more vigorously than any other professional writer explored religious concerns of both the modern heretic, influenced by modern science, and the modern brooder-searcher, an alienated outsider, desperately wanting to believe in traditional values. Persistently he came out as a nonbeliever, yet always with other possibilities open." In 1951 the Swedish Academy of Letters honored him with the Nobel Prize for literature.

Pär Lagerkvist was born on May 23, 1891, in Växjö, Småland, the youngest of seven children in a traditional and deeply religious family. His father, a railroad employee, refused to join his trade union because...