SOURCE: White, George LeRoy, Jr. “Other Outstanding Literary Interpreters of the Scandinavian.” In Scandinavian Themes in American Fiction, pp. 173-92. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937.

In the following excerpt, White provides an overview of Boyesen's writings and investigates his role as a chronicler of Scandinavian immigration.

It is in the writings of Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen that the multifarious problems peculiar to the Scandinavian as an individual first get anything like complete treatment. Prior to his entrance into the field of American letters, the Scandinavian did not appear as an individual immigrant. The historical novels on Norse themes that preceded his time had dealt with historical figures and the few settlement novels that preceded him had dealt with the immigrant as a curious phenomenon of American life. The few Scandinavian stories, dealing with superstitions, landscape, or customs of the Northmen, that appeared before 1870, were, for the most part, romantic...