A DIFFICULT DEATH

While largely unknown today, Danish writer and Darwin translator Jens Peter Jacobsen was the leading prose writer in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century and part of a generation that included Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, and August Strindberg. His novels Mari e Grubbe and Niels Lyhne as well as his stories and poems were widely admired by writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, an d James Joyce. Despite his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight, Jacobsen became a cult figure to an entire g eneration...[Read more]