Prezihov Voranc is his nation's most outstanding representative of social--not socialist--realism, a style that prevailed in Slovene literature during the 1930s. His pen name is a combination of the geographic designation Prezihov vrh and a dialect form of his personal name.

Voranc was born Lovro Kuhar on 10 August 1893 in Kotlje, a village in southeast Carinthia. His father, Ivan, a tenant farmer and lumberjack, was a determined nationalist who instilled in his four sons a fierce pride in their Slovene heritage, which was in constant danger of being subsumed by neighboring German-speaking Austria. Their mother, Marjeta, cared less about the "Carinthian question," although she was a great source of local history, old beliefs, and myths. Her storytelling was Voranc's first source of literary inspiration.

Voranc had little formal education: he completed his compulsory schooling in the two-room school at Kotlje, where German was the predominant language of instruction. He...