Hannu Salama's work and his development as a writer reflect the relationship between literature and society in Finland. Salama was born in 1936 in the industrial city of Tampere, which since the fifties has been Finland's second literary capital—the retreat of the realists, of those opposed to the Helsinki modernists. Earlier Tampere writers like Lauri Viita … and Väinö Linna … represent the "proletarian writer" type in Nordic literature….

Hannu Salama did not join the Tampere group. Having dropped out of school, lonely and fearing hereditary schizophrenia, he shut himself up in the attic of his proletarian home in order to learn to be a writer…. He was able to view his own unusualness objectively in his first novel Se tavallinen tarina (The Usual Story; 1961), which describes how a young girl is driven to mental illness. The work can be interpreted in terms of R. D. Laing's existential psychology...