In his lifetime and for some fifteen years after his death in 1954, Stig Dagerman was regarded as the most typical prose writer of the angst-ridden, pessimistic postwar style known in Sweden as fyrtiotalismen (writing of the 1940s). In the early 1980s a collected edition of his works appeared in Sweden, and there was a marked increase in the number of scholarly books and articles on the man and his works; it became obvious that Dagerman had a much more general appeal and importance than that of a textbook marker as the essence of a particular style. To be sure, he had analyzed the political and psychological situation in Sweden as World War II was replaced by the Cold War; and, from his analysis, he urged his fellow countrymen to face up to facts, to come to grips with political realities in the postwar world, and to search their...