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Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (Perennial Classics)

Ole Edvart Rolvaag

The classic story of a Norwegian pioneer family's struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America.
Their Fathers' God

O. E. Rolvaag, Ole Edvart Rolvaag

Susie Doheny, an Irish Catholic, and Peder Holm, a Norwegian Lutheran, fall in love and marry in South Dakota in the 1890s. Soon their marriage is tested by drought, depression, and family bickering. Susie believes they are being tested by their fathers' God.
Peder blames Susie for the timidity of her beliefs; Susie fears Peder's pride and skepticism. When political antagonism grows between the Norwegian and Irish immigrant communities, it threatens to split their marriage.
Against a backdrop of hard times, crisscrossed by Populists, antimonopolists, and schemers, Rölvaag brings the struggle of immigrants into the twentieth century. In Giants in the Earth the Holm family strained to wrest a homestead from the land. In Peder Victorious the American-born children searched for a new national identity, often defying the traditions their parents fought to uphold. In Their Fathers' God, Rölvaag's most soul-searching novel, the first-generation americans enter a world of ruthless competition in the midst of scarcity.
The University of Nebraska Press also publishes Peder Victorious and Paul Reigstad's Rölvaag: His Life and Art.
The Boat of Longing (Borealis Books)

Ole Edvart Rolvaag

Chronicles the experiences of a sensitive young Norwegian immigrant to Minnesota and deals with the human cost of immigration. The book sharply contrasts a poetic vision of the homeland with the stark reality of life among the poor in Minneapolis in the 1910s.
When the Wind Is in the South and Other Stories

Ole Edvart Rolvaag

Written by the author of the Norwegian-American classic "Giants in the Earth", these six short stories reveal in miniature O.E. Rolvaag's profound understanding of human motivation and his gift for capturing Norwegian-American humor. In these stories - never before published in English - we meet several unforgettable characters, including three self-assured but happless fishermen, a jilted but vengeful farm girl, a new country pastor and his wife whose phone is monitored by their parishioners, and a retired farm wife who awakens to a new sense of self-determination in her marriage. This collection is a fitting complement to Rolvaag's sweeping novels of American frontier life. Rolvaag scholars and admirers, high school and college teachers, and anyone with an interest in immigrant fiction and the American West will want to read these stories by one of America's most famous authors.
The third life of Per Smevik
Peder Victorious

Ole Edvart Rolvaag

1929. Peder Victorious is one of the novels in Rolvaag's famous trilogy, which also includes Giants in the Earth and Their Father's God. They are considered to be the fullest, finest, and most powerful works to have been written about pioneer life in America. This epic tale tells the story of Per Hansa as he moves his family from a fishing village in Norway to the plains of the Dakota Territory in the last part of the 19th century. The book chronicles the Norwegian pioneer family's struggles with the land and the elements of the Dakota Territory as they try to make a new life in America. Contents: The Song of Life's Dismay; The Mill of the Gods; The Eyes That Did Not See; and The Song of the Shulamite. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.
Pure Gold.

Ole Edvart Rolvaag