Rølvaag and Krause
Two Novelists of the Northwest Prairie Frontier
I
I
THE STORY of the settlement of the northwestern
prairie states in America has been told most powerfully and successfully
by Ole E. Rølvaag, the Norwegian-American author of Giants
in the Earth and six other novels about the immigrant experience
on the frontier. While novelists like Herbert Krause–often
labelled as Rølvaag's successor– might win literary
prizes and earn a degree of popularity, Rølvaag was the
only novelist among the Scandinavians and the Germans in the
region to gain a significant measure of success with the American
public. He had the good fortune to be brilliantly translated
and to have chosen as grand a theme as that of any epic or saga:
the struggle of a tenacious and daring pioneer to found his own
kingdom in the wilderness. Moreover, although the Norwegians
made up a relatively small proportion of the North Europeans
who came to the prairies, in Rølvaag they had a spokesman
who not only depicted the part that his own group had played
in the land-taking but so lifted the adventure to the level of
the universal that it described in large measure the experience
of millions of other immigrants and Americans who in the second
half of the nineteenth century pushed the farming frontier westward
from Illinois and Wisconsin into Iowa, Minnesota, and Dakota
Territory.
It can be argued that the Norwegian immigrants were as representative
of this northern farming frontier as any national group, including
the more numerous Germans and Swedes, in that more of them turned
to agriculture than did immigrants from other countries and in
that eighty percent of the 800,000 Norwegians who eventually
came to America were concentrated in the six-state area from
Illinois to the Dakotas. They established themselves in a series
of flourishing settlements: along the Fox River southwest of
Chicago in the early 1830s, at Muskego and Koshkonong in Wisconsin
in 1840, and along the Mississippi and into Iowa and Minnesota
in the years that followed. As these settlements grew and prospered,
burgeoning with churches and schools and helping to attract more
and more Norse immigrants, they served increasingly as "halfway
houses" where newcomers could pause for a while–to learn
the English language and American ways of doing things and to equip themselves, as often
happened, for land-taking farther west. Rølvaag's characters
Per Hansa and Beret spent some years in Minnesota, for example,
before launching out into the great desolation of Dakota Territory.
But no amount of acclimatizing could eliminate the terrible cost
of pioneering paid by many in homesickness, mental illness, and
disease, especially on the prairie frontier, for which few immigrants
could be fully prepared.
The settlements were also the centers for a lively Norwegian-American
intellectual life. From the mid-nineteenth century on, more than
eight hundred newspapers sprang up, written in Norwegian and
directed to "Det norske Amerika," Norwegian America. The
greater number had a brief life span, as was true of most foreign-language
papers, and even the longestlived had a very limited circulation.
Yet they represented the immigrant's desire to keep abreast of
events in the Old World and the New, and they served more practical
purposes as well. In their pages were printed poems, stories,
essays, and–later on–serialized novels, oftentimes
about pioneering and thus useful to those contemplating a move
westward. From the 1870s until Rølvaag's time over a hundred
novels appeared in newspapers and as separate publications, many
of them marked by realistic attention to detail regarding life
in America, particularly in relation to the pioneering experience.
Rølvaag thus had a surprising
number of Norwegian-American predecessors who wrote novels in
their native language about America, even though only a little
of what was written had an impact outside Det norske Amerika.
The same lack of impact was generally true among the other Scandinavians
who wrote. Few readers of any one national group, as a matter
of fact, were even aware of the leading writers in the other
groups; and American readers knew virtually nothing of any of
them. Among the earliest of the Norwegian-American novelists
to write realistically about the immigrant experience in the
West were Nicolai Severin Hassel and Tellef Grundysen. In 1874
Hassel published a long narrative set in Minnesota, entitled
Alf Brage, and followed it with a sequel about the 1862
Indian uprising in Minnesota, Days of Terror. Grundysen's
From Both Sides of the Sea
(1877), set partly in Norway and partly in America, is notable
for the stark realism of its picture of immigrant life in southern
Minnesota. Others who contributed novels about the western experience
were Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, whose 1879 novel Falconberg (in
English) first presented Norwegian immigrant life to American
readers, and H. A. Foss, author of the phenomenally successful
The Cotter Boy (1889). Foss's best frontier novel is Valborg
(1927), an account of a journey from Wisconsin into the Red
River valley of North Dakota. The Cotter Boy stimulated
Peer Olson Strømme to write an artistically superior novel
of settlement life in Wisconsin (Halvor: A Story of Pioneer
Life). First printed in 1892 as a serial in Strømme's
own newspaper Superior Posten, Halvor increased circulation
for that paper just as Foss's novel had done for Decorah-Posten.
In 1906 Strømme published a sequel, Young Helgeson,
a realistic and sometimes comic story of Norwegian pioneer
life along the Red River.
In the twentieth century, although Waldemar Ager, author of Christ
Before Pilate (1910), could be said to have earned the second-highest
place artistically among Norwegian-language novelists (behind
Rølvaag), the best novels of the pioneering experience
were written by Ole A. Buslett, in such psychological works as
The Road to the Golden Gate (1916); by Simon Johnson,
in From Fjord to Prairie (1914) and The Home of Freedom
(1925); and by Johannes B. Wist, in the trilogy Immigrant
Scenes (1920), The Home on the Prairie (1921) and
Jonasville (1922). The most successful and prolific of
the Norwegian-American novelists since Rølvaag has been
Martha Ostenso, who emigrated from near Bergen at an early age.
Unlike nearly all of her predecessors and unlike Rølvaag
himself, she wrote her popular novels of prairie farm life in
English. Although rural settings play an important part in most
of them, beginning with Wild Geese (1925), and while Norwegian
immigrants and their descendants appear occasionally as characters,
as in The Mandrake Root (1938), and O River, Remember!
(1943), there is little about immigrant pioneering, and the
farm background of most of the works is subordinated to plot.
Other recent writers of ScandinavianAmerican origin have given
more attention to their own people. The most notable farm novelist
among them has been Sophus Keith Winther. His trilogy about Danish
immigrants in Nebraska (1936–1938), also written in English,
comes much closer to Rølvaag in its depth of understanding
and in its conclusion that the cost of immigration to those who
came has been greater than its benefits. But Winther, like his
contemporary, Herbert Krause, is a novelist of transition in
the literary tradition of immigrants writing about the West.
His trilogy chronicles the last phases of settlement life and
the struggle of the second and third generations to escape their
narrowly ethnic backgrounds and become assimilated Americans.
The man who was to bring the Scandinavian
immigrant experience to world prominence, Ole Edvart Rølvaag,
was born on April 22, 1876 on an island off the Helgeland coast
of Norway close to the Arctic Circle. The spectacular scenery
of that northern land–the mountains, the barren islands,
the perpetually changing sea, and the extravagant colors of summer–contributed
its share to the peculiar blend of the romantic and the realistic in his character and
in his novels. The second son in a family of eight children,
Rølvaag early had literary ambitions even though he felt
himself always to be inferior in intellect to his older brother,
Johan. As a child Rølvaag wanted to be a writer of songs,
and when he was only ten he started a novel, writing out as many
as five pages in longhand before destroying them in a quarrel
with Johan.
While he was still in school on Dønna Island, Rølvaag
first contracted "America fever" by reading a Norwegian
translation of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans.
The serious decision to emigrate, however, was made later,
when he was sixteen, after a particularly severe storm at sea
destroyed the fishing fleet he had joined. The shock of watching
many of his friends die was a strong motivating factor in Rølvaag's
decision, and soon after he wrote to his uncle Jakob Jakobsen
at Elk Point, South Dakota, asking to borrow the money to go
to America. But when the ticket finally arrived three years later,
he found himself faced with the most difficult decision of his
life: his boss Kristian Andersen offered to make him the skipper
of a fine fishing boat, with the chance to own it outright in
a year– if only he would remain in Norway. Rølvaag
was stunned at the prospect and asked time to consider what to
do. But despite the fact that he had no reasonable excuse for
turning down Andersen's proposal, he finally responded that he
was leaving for America, his land of promise. In the first entries
of his diary he wrote: "I'm going out into the world, to
seek my fortune and happiness. . . . Some day, I believe, I shall
reach the goal, far, far beyond the high mountains."
The romantic yearnings expressed
so frequently in the diary and in the letters that make up The
Third Life of Per Smevik (Amerika-Breve, 1912), Rølvaag's
autobiographical novel, quickly came up against the hard realities
of life in what Wallace Stegner has called the Homestead West.
Although the pioneering phase in South Dakota had been over for
many years, with clapboard houses and barns now replacing the
dugouts and soddies of the first-comers, Rølvaag found
labor on Sivert Eidem's farm terribly strenuous, especially for
a newly arrived immigrant like himself. If on occasion his seaman's
skills gave him a momentary advantage over his fellow laborers–as
when he rescued a haying operation with a timely splice on a
severed rope–for the first months he ran an almost desperate
race to keep up with his uncle and the other workers. "America
may be the promised land," he had Per Smevik say,"but it
will be some time before I admit it. And if it continues to be
as hard on me as it has been up to now, I'll never live long
enough to admit it either." By contrast, Rølvaag wrote
to his brother, people in Norway don't work; they only putter.
The great majority of the people there have no understanding
of the true value of "really economical intensive work."
From the very beginning of his life in America Rølvaag
was aware of the great gap that existed between life in the new
country and that in Norway, and almost immediately he determined
to seek ways in which the heritage of Norwegians in America could
be preserved, as he believed, to the greater strengthening of
the new fatherland. When he arrived in 1896 he was already a
mature man, deeply imbued with a sense of his own culture and
toughened in body and mind by the hard life of a Nordland fisherman.
His love of the ballads and legends of his childhood and his
later reading in classic Norwegian literature had already stimulated
in him an almost passionate commitment to things Norse. He had
come, moreover, during a period when his own people, after two
generations in America, had developed a sense of their cultural
identity as Norwegian-Americans. At the same time he was acutely
aware of both the cost of emigration and the advantages. Among
the gains, as Per Smevik recorded them, were prosperity, magnificent
farms and beautifully kept houses, and with prosperity the development
among the immigrant farmers of a new ability to farm and live
efficiently, to make the best use of time and productive power.
Added to these were the possibility of personal growth, the result
of mingling with people of other cultures, and a new freedom–civil,
religious, and economic– more abundant than that to be found
anywhere else in the world. There had also been losses: the "mighty
and magnificent nature" of Norway, with its power to uplift the
soul; the love of beauty and the cleanliness so characteristic
of the Norwegians; and the spiritual strength that comes from
living with one's own people.
After two years on the Eidem farm, Rølvaag enrolled in
the secondary department of Augustana College at Canton, South
Dakota. His primary purpose was to learn English, but almost
immediately he discovered the joys of studying in a warm and
supportive atmosphere and decided that it was the wisest move
he could have made. "How glorious it is to mingle with a
hundred students!" he wrote in his diary. "That alone develops
and sharpens one's mind. A young man, surrounded by a hundred
companions, will naturally try to be the best one." During the
summers for the next three years he travelled about the West
as a harvest hand and seller of books and stereopticons. The
diary and his first novel record his close observations of the
life of the inhabitants of the midlands, rural folk mostly, and
most of them Norwegian. Again and again (in The Third Life
of Per Smevik) he sets down his disappointment at the lack
of ideals among them, at their total commitment to hogs and cattle.
And yet Rølvaag's lively classmates at Augustana were
the teenage sons and daughters of these same money-grubbing farmers.
This was another disparity in America, between the ideals of
youth and the achievement of maturity,
one that would also fascinate him and that he would probe in
his prairie novels.
Among the many friends whom Rølvaag made at Augustana
was Jennie Marie Berdahl, the third daughter of a pioneering
family from northeast of Sioux Falls and the girl he would later
marry. It was Rølvaag's good fortune to become acquainted
with this family, because over the next several years he would
hear from Jennie's father and uncles countless details about
pioneer life on the sod-house frontier, details of events and
persons that would make their way into Giants in the Earth
and the second and third novels of the Beret Holm trilogy.
It was the adventure of their settlement that especially attracted
Rølvaag, for his romantic soul was drawn to the greatness
of their achievement. But it would be a quarter of a century
before he would turn that material into novel form in the work
that would be his masterpiece.
In the meantime, following graduation from Augustana in 1901,
Rølvaag went to St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota,
with thoughts of studying for the ministry. Two other interests,
however, were stronger: his intense dedication to preserving
Norwegian heritage in America and his love of literature, particularly
the works of Bjørnson and Ibsen. During his junior year
he began a novel, Nils and Astri, an idyllic tale in which
an important issue for a group of Norwegian settlers in North
Dakota is how much of their native culture should or could be
preserved in the new land. Although he hoped to see the work
in print before graduation, it was rejected and remains unpublished.
In 1905–1906 Rølvaag finished his formal college
work with a year of study at the University of Christiania (Oslo),
and then returned to St. Olaf as a teacher in the academy. The
year in Norway was especially rewarding, for he completed his
courses with the highest grades attainable and in the process
proved to himself that he was now more American than Norwegian.
He wrote to Jennie Berdahl that he took deep pride in his high
grades because "I was an American, and the big fellows in
Christiania have not much faith in us." When he landed in New
York on his return, the rush of the city overwhelmed him: "I
liked it, I liked it," he later told Lincoln Colcord. "Tears
came to my eyes. This was America, my
country. I had come home."
For the next twenty-five years
Rølvaag taught at St. Olaf, the leading college of Norwegian-Lutheran
background, continued his crusade for biculturalism, and wrote
a series of essays and novels that explored the dilemma of the
Norwegian in an American environment. In 1910 he began to write
The Third Life of Per Smevik (Amerika-Breve) ,
the first of his published works and the first to have a western
locale and theme. Set in eastern South Dakota between 1896 and
1901, the novel appeared under a pen name because of the highly
personal nature of the adventures described. The Third Life
of Per Smevik is a disguised account, in epistolary form,
of Rølvaag's first years in America, of the hard physical
labor, of the struggle of the immigrant to master the language
and a host of new ways, of the power that greed had over many
on the prairie, and of his own fight to rise above the poverty
and ignorance of his station in life. When the novel was published
in Minneapolis in 1912, it received a number of favorable reviews,
with particular praise being given to the accuracy of the picture
of farm life on the prairies. About the accuracy at least there
seems little doubt. As Rølvaag's brother Johan wrote to
him,"As far as subject matter goes–these
are merely the letters you have written home to Father and me."
The next two novels continued the
theme of the power of the prairie to seduce the immigrant away
from his cultural roots into an "America fever" for material
wealth. On Forgotten Paths (1914) is the story of such
an immigrant, Chris Larsen, who sells his soul for the rich farmland
around Elk Point, where Rølvaag had lived and worked.
Although it is a melodramatic exaggeration of a man obsessed
with the prairie, the novel is important for its picture of immigrant
life in South Dakota and on the plains of Canada, as well as
for its foreshadowing of the two main characters of Giants
in the Earth: Chris, like Per Hansa in Giants, is
the aggressive, even arrogant, land-taker, a metaphor of naked
human will; and Magdalene, like Beret, is the troubled pioneer
wife, haunted by memories of her homeland and certain that her
greatest sin was her immigration.
In Pure Gold, first published as To Tullinger (Two
Fools) in 1920, Rølvaag intensified the theme of material
wealth as the fatal temptation for the immigrant farmer. A second-generation
Norwegian couple, Lars and Lizzie Houglum, wring from the soil
every dollar they can and increase their hoard by means of sharp
dealings with their neighbors. Although they survive bank failures,
confidence men, and the anti-foreigner hysteria of World War
I, they succumb at last to their own greed and fear, virtually
committing suicide as they try to protect their savings. In an
ironic ending that crystallizes Rølvaag's disdain for
the poor exchange many immigrants had made in trading their cultural
heritage for prosperity, the undertaker burns their clothes–
and their money belts–because of his fear of disease, and
so the tens of thousands in bank notes that they have cherished
and guarded as if they were children turn into slender columns
of blue smoke that dissipate in the prairie sky.
The last of the novels to be written before Rølvaag's
prairie masterpiece Giants in the Earth was The Boat
of Longing, published in Norwegian in 1921. The main character
is the idealist Nils Vaag, who hopes to find goodness and beauty
before he has lived long enough in the real world to experience its disillusions. Once again
Rølvaag is interested in the immigrant's attempt to transplant
himself to America. But America is not the ideal land for many,
especially for the sensitive dreamer who seeks spiritual growth
in a country that nourishes a hearty materialism instead. And
so Nils is increasingly disillusioned, first in Minneapolis,
where men live like beasts, then in a logging camp in northern
Minnesota. In the final section, Rølvaag turns from Nils's
story to that of his heartbroken father, who travels from Norway
to America in a hopeless effort to find his son. Two of the themes
that were to concern Rølvaag in the prairie trilogy are
central here: the struggle of the immigrant to retain his identity
in an alien land and the cost in human suffering both to those
who emigrated and to those who remained behind.
When, in early 1923, he read that
the well-known Norwegian writer Johan Bojer was planning a novel
about the settling of America, Rølvaag was spurred to
take on the task himself, one that he had been contemplating
for some time. He was convinced that he was the man for the job–
even though he had come long after the West had been settled–because
he had devoted his life to a study of the dilemma of the Norwegian-American
and because he himself had worked the land, had wandered over
the last frontier in the Dakotas, and had married into a pioneer
family whose memory was rich in settlement lore.
He immediately requested a leave of absence from St. Olaf College
and spent the next twelve months writing at top speed, first
at his retreat at Big Island Lake in northern Minnesota, then
briefly in Sioux Falls at his father-in-law's house, even more
briefly in London, and finally in Oslo, where Aschehougs Forlag,
Norway's largest publishing firm, finally accepted the new novel
for publication. In itself the acceptance was a remarkable testimony
to Rølvaag's genius, for he was only the second Norwegian-American
writer ever to be published by a Norwegian firm, the first being
Waldemar Ager in 1910 with Christ Before Pilate. Rølvaag's
novel appeared in 1924 and 1925 in two parts, I de Dage: Fortaelling
om Norske Nykommere i Amerika (In Those Days: A Story
of Norwegian lmmigrants in America) and I de Dage: Riket
Grundlaegges (In Those Days: The Founding of the Kingdom),
and he was immediately hailed by Norwegian critics as a major
writer and a master of the language, accomplishments he had scarcely
dreamed were possible. In America, however, recognition came
more slowly; two years were to pass before an English version
was published, translated by Rølvaag and Lincoln Colcord
and called Giants in the Earth (1927). The novel was an
even greater success in America, for it was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month
Club selection and went into its thirty-third printing by the
end of the year. The reviewers were quick to place it at the
forefront of the pioneering novels; Carl Sandburg, himself the
son of Swedish immigrants, ranked it among the six most important
American novels, past and present, and it has remained in print
ever since, assuming the position of a classic in American fiction
and vindicating the judgment of the first enthusiastic reviewers.
The story of the novel is that of Per Hansa and his wife Beret
and their settlement in the early 1870s on the South Dakota prairie
frontier, on the high ground west of the Big Sioux River where
Per can establish the kingdom he has been seeking ever since
coming to America years before. Here is his chance to experience
adventures, to own land, to become wealthy, in short, to act
out the career of the Ash Lad of Norse fairy tales who rises
from the humblest origins "to win the princess and half
the kingdom." Per moves from one victorious adventure to another,
subduing the virgin prairie, building an ingenious sod house
and supplying his family's needs with a cleverness and a dedication
that arouse the envious admiration of his neighbors. It seems
to them that there is nothing he cannot do. But Per's plan for
winning his West is seriously flawed: he will not gain the happiness
he seeks without a loving and supportive wife. And while he confidently
overcomes one obstacle after another, he ignores the deep psychological
distress that is slowly growing in her. The Dakota prairie for
her is an alien and demonic force in mortal combat with the settlers,
quite the opposite of the beautiful and spiritually nourishing
mountains and valleys of her homeland. Although the first indications
of Beret's impending insanity appear during the lonely hours
when Per is away from home, it is his destruction of the Irishmen's
claim stakes that leads to the first break between husband and
wife and a deepening of her emotional suffering. In Beret's mind
the explanation for his crime is clear: "This desolation
out here called forth all that was evil in human nature. . .
. What would become of children who had to grow up in such an
atmosphere? . . . Her soul shuddered." Beret's agony increases
until she loses her sanity, and only after the first minister
comes to the Spring Creek settlement is her emotional health
restored.
While Beret personifies the immigrant pioneer's fear of external
and internal dangers, Per personifies courage and stubborn will.
He commits himself to denying the power of his Norwegian past
and to constructing upon its ashes his own fabulous kingdom.
His is that "indomitable, conquering mood which seemed to
give him the right of way, wherever he went, whatever he did."
Beret, on the other hand, clings to the past and to her homeland
as the sources of her emotional and spiritual strength. It is
this diametrical opposition in outlook, a duality like that in
his own character, that Rølvaag places at the center of
the meaning of Giants in the Earth.
When, toward the end of the novel, the first Norwegian Lutheran
minister appears in the settlement, he brings wonderful comfort
to Beret, for he avers that the immigrant pioneers
seated before him are truly founding a kingdom, albeit one that
will be a blessing in the future "only in so far as they
remained steadfast to the truths implanted in them as children
by their fathers." The message, however, is a bitter blow to
Per Hansa, for he is constructing his kingdom alone, he believes,
and to accept God's supremacy anew is to give up his independence
and indeed his very manhood. In the end Per maintains his will
intact, but it is a hollow victory. His final mission, to brave
a blizzard in order to bring a minister for his dying friend
Hans Olsa, is almost a reflex action: Per will again prove to
his neighbors that he is the invincible one, but he will also
hurl defiance once more at the God of his fathers, who demands
faith and obedience. This time he fails.
After Per Hansa's death, by an
ironic turn of fate Beret herself accepts the challenge of the
prairie and fulfills her dead husband's dream of establishing
the kingdom. But in the process she loses many of the qualities
that at times had made her an endearing figure in Giants in
the Earth. The two sequels that complete the prairie trilogy,
Peder Victorious (1929) and Their Fathers' God (1931),
tell the contrasting stories of Beret, the traditionalist, and
her son Peder, the representative of the Americanized second
generation. In Peder Victorious Beret devotes herself
to the twin tasks of managing her prosperous farm and of preserving
the heritage of Norwegian language, custom, and faith that she
sees rapidly disappearing from the community. Her son Peder,
however, is caught in the conflicting pulls of loyalty to home
and eagerness to become assimilated. In the process, Beret and
tradition lose out; Peder discards everything that she treasures
and seals the rejection of his Norwegianness by marrying Susie
Doheny, his Irish-Catholic sweetheart.
In Their Fathers God Beret remains the most strongly delineated
character, but she becomes an increasingly unsympathetic one,
relentlessly clinging to her old values and unfairly critical
of her daughter-in-law Susie. Peder and Susie, by contrast, hardly
come to life as real characters, so obviously do they represent
each side of the conflict between Norwegian Lutherans and Irish
Catholics in Spring Creek. It is Peder's grudging admission at
the last that he is American and Norwegian which holds
the only hope for the future, because his heritage is essential
to his happiness. But the admission comes only after his mother's
death and the breakup of his marriage.
When Rølvaag died in 1931, his concept of a rich and vital
America composed of hyphenated immigrant groups in healthy touch
with their national heritages seemed to be passing with him.
Fewer and fewer of his own people, certainly, were able to read
Norwegian, and many of those who did resented the harsh realism
in Rølvaag's portrayal of the pioneering experience
and its aftermath. But today, with a widespread new interest
in roots among all American groups, it appears that something
at least of Rølvaag's dream is still alive. More important,
as the attention of scholars is increasingly directed to the
phenomenon of immigration, it is as clear as it has ever been
that the history of the country will not be written until each
nationality has completed its own story, and that the history
of the American West will not be complete until each group has
defined its part in creating that geographical and psychological
entity. The literary history of the American West, in turn, can
be perfected only when the western work of immigrant authors,
written in their native languages, is made accessible in translation.
More than half the people who settled the West, after all, were
immigrants, and much of the story of their adventuring and suffering
on the American frontier still lies hidden in the obscurity of
foreign-language novels, stories, newspapers and magazines, and
masses of letters and diaries.
The question of whether Ole E. Rølvaag is an American
author is easier to decide today than it was half a century ago.
As Rølvaag himself argued, two chapters in American history
stand out above the rest: the Westward Movement and Immigration.
He was fully a part of both. Moreover, in large measure the two
are inseparable and can be defined only in terms of one another.
Lincoln Colcord, Rølvaag's translator, opened his Introduction
to Giants in the Earth with these words: "It is a
unique experience, all things considered, to have this novel
by O. E. Rølvaag, so palpably European in its art and
atmosphere, so distinctly American in everything it deals with
. . . ; in Rølvaag we have a European author of our own–one
who writes in America, about America, whose only aim is to tell
of the contributions of his people to American life; and who
yet must be translated for us out of a foreign tongue."Rølvaag
himself devoted his life to the effort to teach his Norwegian
countrymen that they could be good Americans and good
Norwegians, could–in fact–be better citizens of the
new country by preserving their cultural heritage from the old.
That meant for him language, customs, folkways, and the rich
cultural and religious heritage of the fatherland. And yet, while
his masterpiece is the most authentic and most powerful depiction
ever written about the Norwegian immigrant experience on the
western prairies, it is also one of the most successful portrayals
of the sod-house frontier as it was experienced by immigrants
of every stripe, and Americans, too. Rølvaag thought of
Giants in the Earth as "a document humaine, one
that should be true for all racial groups, more or less, and
endure the acid test of time"; and so far he seems to have been
right.
It is appropriate that the novelist
who has been most often compared to Ole Rølvaag should
be Herbert Krause, author of Wind Without Rain (1939)
and two other western novels and, like Rølvaag, a spokesman
for his own ethnic group, the Germans of western Minnesota. Upon
the appearance of Wind Without Rain, no lesser critics
than John Gould Fletcher and Lincoln Colcord, among many, praised
Krause as a successor to Rølvaag in the realistic treatment
of life on the northern prairies; and the comparison was made
again by critics and reviewers after the appearance of The
Thresher in 1947, when Krause's earlier promise seemed to
have been confirmed. The comparison is appropriate, certainly,
because of the similarities in subject matter and treatment in
their novels, but it takes on an added interest in that Krause's
admiration for Rølvaag led him to set out consciously
to tell the story of his people as Rølvaag had told the
story of the Norwegians. Because of Rølvaag, St. Olaf
College (Northfield, Minnesota) was sacred ground to Krause,
"literarily speaking," although the two men never met. Rølvaag
died shortly after Krause arrived on campus, but his influence
continued strong during Krause's three years there. In an unpublished
student essay on his own Lutheran heritage, Krause asked: "Is
it not time for the appearance of writers imbued with Lutheran
idealism but possessing the artistic eye and the warm sympathy
of a Rølvaag to interpret our heritage accurately yet
sympathetically?" In a few years Krause would begin to answer
that question.
Unlike Rølvaag, however,
who had absorbed the Norwegian classics as a youth and admired
them all his life, Krause was very little affected by novelists
of his own national group, whether writing in America or in Europe.
Brought up in the narrow valleys of western Minnesota ("Pockerbrush,"
as he called the region), he had little contact with the mainstream
of GermanAmerican intellectual life. While most German immigrants
elsewhere in the Middle West, like those depicted in August Derleth's
novels about the Wisconsin River Valley settlements, were more
prosperous than their Scandinavian neighbors because they brought
more capital with them to America, the Germans in Pockerbrush
had little material wealth and fewer cultural possessions; they
knew virtually nothing of the German-American literary heritage,
even of so popular a writer as Charles Sealsfield, whose early
nineteenth-century adventure novels of the southern and southwestern
frontiers were widely read in America and Europe. Instead, apart
from the influence of German folkways in Pockerbrush, the chief
literary influences on the youthful Krause were the American
magazine stories and the novels of the 1920s and, as he insisted
in later years, the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare.
Herbert Krause was born on May
25, 1905, on a small farm ten miles north-northeast of Fergus
Falls. The township of his birth is called Friberg, a name given
it in 1874 by the German settlers there. His parents were poor
farmers, descendants of some of those settlers who had immigrated
from Saxony and Mecklenburg. Herbert's childhood in the hills
of Friberg was like all childhoods, a mixture of pleasure and
pain, of failure and success, but for him the beauty and the
hurt of growing up burned more deeply into the heart and mind
than was true for most youngsters. He was small for his age,
a runt he called himself later, with a good-sized chip on his
shoulder. And he stood out as different among the children of
the neighborhood because of his intellectual precocity and his
love of literature.
As early as age ten he determined to become a writer and started
keeping a notebook in which he recorded those events, observations,
and impressions that most affected him. Although his friends
and a few favorite relatives encouraged him in his choice, his
parents thought otherwise. Once an eldest son had been confirmed
and had finished school, they believed, his duty lay in helping
to support his family, in this case five younger brothers and
sisters. If there were to be more education for Herbert, they
insisted, it would have to be preparation for the ministry, and
it could not happen soon. His efforts to teach himself to write
fiction and poetry, consequently, were viewed with suspicion.
The money he spent in 1922 in enrolling in the Short Story Department
of the Hoosier Institute they considered a waste, and they discouraged
even the purchase of magazines.
Instead, Herbert's parents argued, he should consider educating
himself for the Missouri Synod Lutheran ministry, but only when
he had earned the necessary money himself and only when his younger
brother Julius was old enough to be able to manage the farm on
his own while the father ran the blacksmith shop. This seems
to have been an idea which Herbert shared to some degree, for
he was devout as a youth, convinced of the rightness of his church's
doctrine–although not of some of its excesses. In a letter
to Wallace Stegner in 1939 Krause looked back with less than
total sympathy at the more rigorous aspects of his own religious
training: "I've had a solidly pious upbringing in a Lutheran
home–which means endless hours of Bible reading and catechism;
which means parochial school, more Bible, catechism and doctrine
by the yard; which means church on Sunday and fire and brimstone
from the pulpit, the worthlessness of man and the glory of heaven–`I'm
but a stranger here, Heaven is my home.' I've never had an opportunity
to forget that."
In October 1926, despite his desire
to attend a German Lutheran school, Krause enrolled in the academy
division of Park Region Luther College, a small coeducational
Norwegian Lutheran Synod school in Fergus Falls. After three
years he went on to Concordia Teachers College (River Forest,
Illinois), a school of his own synod, in order to prepare to
be a parochial school teacher. But because of the severe hazing
he underwent there, he left after only three days and enrolled
at Concordia Theological Seminary in Springfield. That experience
was no better. As had been the case at River Forest, Krause was
placed below where he had hoped, in the latter instance two full
years away from beginning the four-year seminary program, and
so his frustration continued to mount. In a few days he returned
to Fergus Falls and the welcoming arms of President Einar Wulfsberg
and the Norwegians at Park Region, there to complete his first
two years of college.
In the fall of 1931 he enrolled at St. Olaf College, hoping to
come under the influence of Ole Rølvaag. Instead he became
the protege of Professor George Weida Spohn, and for him wrote
out the first sixty-one pages of a story about a domineering
father and a rebellious son; it was the outline of what would
become Wind Without Rain. Krause carried the pages with
him to the University of Iowa in 1934, where he earned the M.A.
with a small collection of poems called "Pockerbrush" as
his thesis. That spring, too, he received word that he had been
awarded a six-weeks' scholarship for the summer of 1935 to the
Bread Loaf School of English. The best part of Bread Loaf was
meeting such writers as Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Theodore Morrison,
Stephen Vincent Benét, and Robert Frost. The latter two
in particular impressed Krause, both poets and Pulitzer Prize
winners and both warmly supportive of his verses. Krause wrote
to his mother: "Met Frost, the greatest poet in America
today, and he likes Pockerbrush." In his turn, Frost kept track
of Krause through their mutual friend Charles Foster, and in
early 1937 wrote cheerfully of Krause as one of his great hopes
and asked him to bring something to read the next summer.
At Iowa in the fall of 1935 Krause began his struggle toward
the Ph.D. degree and at the same time tried to come up with an
idea for a creative project that could serve as a doctoral dissertation.
Late in 1935 there arrived an odd but timely inquiry from Simon
and Schuster. One of the editors, Maria Leiper, had seen Krause's
short poem "Hillside Burial" in American Prefaces, had
admired it, and wrote: "Is there any chance that you're
at work on a novel? If so, and your commitments permit, we'd
like very much to hear from you." Burdened as he was with coursework,
Krause delayed any further contact until the following fall when
he sent thirty pages of Wind Without Rain to Leiper. With
her encouragement and that of Professors Wilbur Schramm, Edwin
Ford Piper, and Norman Foerster, Krause continued to write,
submitting the material to other publishers as well, until Bobbs-Merrill
accepted the novel in October 1937, on the basis of 150 typed
pages. The completed work was published on February 13, 1939.
The main threads of the narrative
in Wind Without Rain are threefold: the complicated relationship
within the Vildvogel family, in which Father Johan's brutal mistreatment
of his four sons leads to their hatred and rebellion; equally
complicated relations between the family and their neighbors
in the hills; and the story of Franz's love for two girls and
his virtual destruction because of them. Despite the efforts
of the gentle mother to stand between her sons and the father's
wrath, two of them run away and one, Franz, is left an emotional
cripple by the end of the novel. The fourth, Jeppy, the narrator,
is injured in a sledding accident and remains an all-but-helpless
observer. It is his voice that speaks the whole of Wind Without
Rain, the words of an invalid recalling from a distant hospital
their impoverished life in Pockerbrush, "a sort of hen-fight
to snatch from life a moldy rind of
happiness. . . ."
Critics and reviewers were impressed
with the novel on its appearance, particularly with the dark
mood sustained throughout and with the beauty of Krause's poetry.
Nature is portrayed as pitiless but lovely, they noted: pain
begets pain, and goodness and gentleness are crushed more often
than nourished. The New York Times reviewer found it impossible
to say anything temperate about Wind Without Rain: "almost
all of its qualities are in excess," she wrote. The world he
presents is not so much a real corner of Minnesota as it is "some
peculiarly joyless and tortured realm of the mind." Wallace Stegner,
in The Saturday Review, found its realism to be its strength,
in combination with its richly rewarding prose. "We have
waited a long time," he said, "for a writer who could, without
compromising in the least the integrity of his observation, or
softening his picture of the world, still transmute that real
world into beauty." On March 16, 1939, in Chicago, with fellow
Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis looking on, Krause was awarded the
$1000 Friends of American Writers Award for the year's best novel
of midwestern life.
Following the success of Wind Without Rain, Krause delayed
his second novel for eight years, teaching at Augustana College
(Sioux Falls, South Dakota) and paying off debts, and enjoying
the turn of Fortune's wheel that had flung him up from poverty
into literal fame and fortune. As early as October 9, 1933, to
be sure, he had recorded in his diary the passing of Bill Welbrock,
the last of the picturesque threshers in the Hills, and had noted
that threshing was worthy of a story. And in the summer of 1937,
when he was laboring on Wind Without Rain, he wrote to
Norman Foerster, Director of the Iowa School of Letters,
that among the projects to follow was a novel about the threshers
and another of young and old farmers in conflict. He was to combine
the two in The Thresher, begun in earnest in late 1943
and published finally in January 1947.
Once again the scene is Pockerbrush and once again the central
character is a young man, struggling against a variety of human
and natural forces as he attempts to realize his potential. In
this novel, however, a single character dominates the action,
Johnny Black, a figure like Rølvaag's Per Hansa or Chris
Larsen–who is driven by a dream of power to exploit his
neighbors and to seek revenge for a series of real and imagined
injuries. As the owner of first one and finally three threshing
machines, he extracts tribute from the wheat farmers of the region
as if he were a king and they his subjects. In the process he
loses his best friend Snoose in a threshing accident and watches
his unchurched wife Lilice–much like Per's wife Beret–
go mad with the fear of God's wrath and retribution. He cannot,
however, prevent the sweep of change in the valley: just as his
steam-powered rigs drove the old horsepower out of business,
so the new gasoline tractors begin to replace steam. Johnny's
ending is doubly ironic: he dies attempting to rescue his obsolescent
rig from a fire, on the very day that his wife Lilice regains
her sanity and looks for his return.
Once again Krause received extensive and largely favorable reviews,
with many critics acclaiming The Thresher as superior
in plot and poetic style to Wind Without Rain and most
agreeing that Krause belonged among the important writers of
American fiction. Nevertheless, despite book club sales that
approached 400,000, Krause was depressed by the fact that by
March the novel had fallen from the best seller lists and that
only 15,000 copies were sold through regular outlets. It was
a discouraging turn of events, a foreshadowing of his eventual
decision to give up novel writing.
The last of Krause's novels to
see print was The Oxcart Trail (1954), a deeply researched
adventure tale about old St. Paul and white and Indian relations
on the forest frontier in Minnesota. As his most "western"
novel, it includes the familiar motifs: the flight west to escape
the law, the rough-and-tumble life of a frontier village, the
overland trek through hostile country, skirmishes with the Chippewa
and Sioux, and even the love affair between the frontiersman
and the school teacher. The central character of the novel, Shawnie
Dark, is less fully realized than either Franz Vildvogel or Johnny
Black. Although some of the same themes are there–a haunting
fear that pursues him, love for a seemingly unattainable woman,
and the hard and often brutal life on the frontier–the story
ends happily after many arduous adventures, with the hero and
heroine contemplating their future as settlers in the Ottertail
River country, the country that later would be called Pockerbrush.
Many critics were hard on The Oxcart Trail for its leisurely
narrative, its banal love story and the occasional lapses in
continuity. Their objections and the novel's relatively poor
sales were irritating, to be sure, because of the exhaustive
research that Krause had done in order to create a fictional
treatment both fresh and authentic of a time and a place that
were of great significance in the winning of the West. Even more
galling was the knowledge that during the writing the editorial
staff at Bobbs-Merrill had encouraged Krause to curb "over-gloomy
introspection" and to make this new book "a warm novel full
of laughter and triumph." They had called it his best work while
he was writing it, and had hurried him into publication to boot.
Although it sold better than most novels that season, its total
sales were fewer than 10,000, well below Wind Without Rain
and far below The
Thresher. Krause considered it a failure.
The last twenty-two years of his life until his death in 1976 Krause devoted largely to teaching and to a new love that he had acquired in the late 1940s, ornithology. Most of his later research and writing was done in that field, and while he still nourished the hope of producing more novels, he eventually scrapped the plans for two Pockerbrush tales, one a psychological study to be called Emma-August and the other the story of a war veteran who tries to bring his Japanese bride back to the narrow confines of the hills above Fergus Falls. Krause's last full-length works were Crazy Horse (1960), an elaborate outdoor pageant (unpublished), and Prelude to Glory, an edition of the newspaper accounts of Lt. Col. George Custer's invasion in 1874 of the Black Hills in what is now South Dakota. While competent and important in their own ways, neither approached the significance of his first two novels; these last books lay too far in the distance from those powerful experiences that had shaped Krause's youth, the mud and dust and sweat of German-American immigrant life in the Pockerbrush hills.
ARTHUR R. HUSEBOE, Augustana College
Selected Bibliography OLE E. RØLVAAG
Published Books
The Boat of Longing. Translated by Nora Solum. 1933; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974. English version of Laengselens Baat (1921).
Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie. Translated by Lincoln Colcord and Rølvaag. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927. Translated from I de Dage: Fortaelling om Norske Nykommere i Amerika (1924) and I de Dage: Riket Grandlaegges (1925).
[Paal Mørck, pseud.] Paa Glemte Veie (On Forgotten Paths). Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1914.
Peder Victorious. Translated by Nora Solum and Rølvaag. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929. English version of Peder Seier (1928).
Pure Gold. Translated by Sivert Erdahl and Rølvaag. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930. English version of To Tullinger (Two Fools, 1920).
Their Fathers' God. Translated by Trygve M. Ager. 1931; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973. English version of Den Signede Dag (The Blessed Day, 1931).
[Paal Mørck, pseud.] The Third Life of Per Smevik. Translated by Ella Valborg Tweet and Solveig Zempel. Minneapolis: Dillon Press, 1971. Translated from AmerikaBreve (Letters from America, 1912) by his daughter and granddaughter. Valuable introduction.
Critical and Biographical Studies
Andersen, Arlow W. The Norwegian-Americans. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Places immigration in the perspective of general American history; includes a chapter on literature.
Blegen, Theodore. Norwegian Migration to America: The American Transition. North-field, Minn.: The Norwegian-American Historical Association, Vol. 2, 1940. Tracks the immigrant from Norway to America, including the pioneering experience and social, economic and cultural transitions. Includes a chapter on Norwegian-American fiction.
Colcord, Lincoln. "Rølvaag the Fisherman Shook His Fist at Fate." American Magazine 105 (March 1928): 36–37, 188–192. Includes personal reminiscences by Rølvaag.
Commager, Henry Steele, ed. Immigration and American History: Essays in Honor of Theodore C. Blegen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961. Includes an essay by John T. Flanagan on the immigrant in western fiction.
Flanagan, John T. "The Middle Western Farm Novel." Minnesota History 23 (June 1942): 113–125. On the contributions of Garland, Cather, Rølvaag and others.
Gvaale, Gudrun Hovde. Introduction to Peder Victorious. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. The Introduction is translated by Einar Haugen from Gvaale's Nordmann og Amerikanar.
. O. E. Rølvaag: Nordmann og Amerikanar. Oslo: Aschehoug og Co., 1962. In Norwegian.
Haugen, Einar. "Norway in America: The Hidden Heritage." In Makers of an American Immigrant Legacy, edited by Odd S. Lovoll, pp. 15–28. Northfield, Minn. : The Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1980. Includes an account of Norwegian-American novelists.
Jorgenson, Theodore, and Nora Solum. Ole Edvart Rølvaag: A Biography. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939. The standard life, more detailed than Reigstad, with much primary material.
Meldrum, Barbara. "Fate, Sex, and Naturalism in Rølvaag'sTrilogy." In Ole Rølvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader, edited by Gerald Thorson, pp. 41–49. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1975. A groundbreaking essay on Rølvaag as a naturalist, comparable to Hemingway and Faulkner.
Meyer, Roy W. The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Giants is "the most satisfying treatment of the pioneering theme that has thus far appeared in the literature of the Middle West."
Mossberg, Christer Lennart. Scandinavian Immigrant Literature. Western Writers Series, no. 47. Boise: Boise State University, 1981. Gives special attention to novelists Simon Johnson, Ole Rølvaag, and Sophus Winther.
Norwegian American Studies. Northfield, Minn. Begun in 1926 with Volume I and published by the Norwegian-American Historical Association, these collections are an invaluable source of articles about Rølvaag and other Norwegian-American authors, Norwegian immigration, the Westward Movement, and other topics related to Norwegians in America. Volume 28 was issued in 1979.
Parrington, Vernon Louis. "Editor's Introduction." In Giants in the Earth. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929. Reprinted in Main Currents in American Thought. Three vols. in one. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. Vol. 3, pp. 387–396. The essay helped to place Rølvaag in the mainstream of American literature.
Paulson, Kristoffer F. "Berdahl Family History and Rølvaag's Immigrant Trilogy." In Norwegian American Studies 27 (1977): 55–76. Provides specific evidence of Rølvaag's reliance on his wife's family for accurate information about pioneering.
Reigstad, Paul. Rølvaag: His Life and Art. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. The most recent critical biography. Includes a bibliography.
Rølvaag, Ole E. "Contemporary Writers and Their Works: Giants in the Earth" The Editor 17 (August 6, 1927): 81–85. Giants is about the glory as well as the cost of settling the frontier.
Ruud, Curtis. "Rølvaag, the Ash Lad, and New and Old World Values." In Big Sioux Pioneers, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe, pp. 63–78. Sioux Falls: The Nordland Heritage Foundation, 1980. Per Hansa's sacrifice for Hans Olsa lifts him above the mere materialism of the Ash Lad's quest.
Semmingsen, Ingrid. Norway to America. Translated by Einar Haugen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. Definitive study of emigration from the Norwegian perspective.
Simonson, Harold P. The Closed Frontier: Studies in American Literary Tragedy. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Essays on Twain, Rølvaag, and Nathanael West as illustrating the tragedy implicit in the end of the pioneering era in America.
Skårdal, Dorothy Burton. The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience Through Literary Sources. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. Uses fiction and poetry by immigrant authors to create a social history of ScandinavianAmericans from 1870 to the mid twentieth century.
Bibliographies
Reigstad, Paul. Bibliography in Rølvaag: His Life and Art. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.
"Checklist: Articles and Books on Rølvaag." In Ole Rølvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader, edited by Gerald Thorson. Northfield, Minn.: St. Olaf College Press, 1975.
Unpublished Sources
The Rølvaag Collection. Letters, diary, autobiography, manuscripts, Robert Bjerke's bibliography, etc. in 50 document cases in the Archives of The Norwegian-American Historical Society. St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.
HERBERT KRAUSE Published Books
Neighbor Boy. Iowa City, Iowa: Midland House, 1939. Thirty-nine lyric and narrative poems with Pockerbrush themes.
The Oxcart Trail. 1954; rpt. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brevet Press, 1976.
Prelude to Glory: A newspaper accounting of Custer's 1874 expedition to the Black Hills. Edited with Gary Olson. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brevet Press, 1974.
The Thresher. 1946; rpt. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brevet Press, 1976.
Wind Without Rain. 1939; rpt. Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Brevet Press, 1976.Krause's work has appeared in many periodicals and collections: poetry, short stories, lectures and essays (most of these latter on ornithological subjects), and book reviews.
Critical and Biographical Studies
Baldwin, Carl R. "What Custer Was After." St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 25, 1974, p. 4B. Calls Prelude to Glory a "masterpiece of sorts" because of its use of original newspaper accounts.
Borgenicht, Miriam. "Wind Without Rain." The New Republic 98 (March 8, 1939): 144. An impressive effort, despite its sustained grimness.
Chaikin, Nancy Groberg . "A Man's Drive for Power." Saturday Review of Literature 30 (February 8, 1947): 12. Praise for the poetic language of The Thresher.
Connole, John M. "The Oxcart Trail." America, National Catholic Weekly Review 91 (June 5, 1954): 282. Characters and their frontier idiom are well handled, although the story occasionally drags.
Fadiman, Clifton. "Books." The New Yorker 14 (February 11, 1939): 72–73. The two themes of Wind Without Rain are frustrated talent and the dissolution of a family.
Flanagan, John T. "Frontier in Fiction." Minnesota History 34 (Autumn 1954): 123–124. Less successful than the first two novels, The Oxcart Trail is harmed by too much concern for accuracy and authenticity.
Frederick, John T. "When a Poet Writes About a Farmer." Chicago Sun Book Week, January 19, 1947, p. 4. Praises The Thresher for its spontaneous poetry, lavish use of details and lavish characters.
Gray, James. "Liquor, Love and Brawling on the Long Road Westward." New York Herald Tribune Book Review, April 4, 1954, p. 5. A new design for the historical novel, The Oxcart Trail is based on painstaking research.
Havighurst, Walter. "Driving Force on the Prairie." New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review 23 (January 12, 1947): 4. The Thresher is a "solidly constructed and skillfully unified novel."
Janssen, Judith M. "Black Frost in Summer: Central Themes in the Novels of Herbert Krause." South Dakota Review 5 (Spring 1967): 55–65. Armed with a sound knowledge of his region and period, Krause explores the tragic effects of hardship and cruelty on sensitive and talented youths. [Klausler, Alfred]. "Dostoevsky in Minnesota." The Cresset 2 (March 1939): 47–49. The picture of the hell-breathing Lutheran pastor, Sunnenbaum, is almost a caricature.
Krause, Herbert. "Herbert Krause." In Minnesota Writers, edited by Carmen Nelson Richards, pp. 19–27. Minneapolis: T. S. Denison, 1961. A valuable autobiographical sketch.
Meyer, Roy W. The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. Krause and Paul Corey represent the highest development of the farm novel.
Nute, Grace Lee. A History of Minnesota Books and Authors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958. Krause's farm novels combine realism with folklore and poetic imagery.
Paulson, Kristoffer, F. "Ole Rølvaag, Herbert Krause, and the Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner." In Where the West Begins, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer, pp. 24–33. Sioux Falls: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978. Both Giants and The Thresher demonstrate Turner's warning against excessive individual liberty.
Steensma, Robert C. "`Our Comings and Our Goings': Herbert Krause's Wind Without Rain."In Where the West Begins, pp. 13–22. Music, dances, and Mason's Resort symbolically trace the spiritual destruction of Franz Vildvogel.
Stegner, Wallace. "A Strong Novel of the Minnesota Land." Saturday Review of Literature 19 (February 11, 1939): 5. Krause combines rich poetic expression with tragic realism.
Wallace, Margaret. "Wind Without Rain and Other Recent Works of Fiction." New York Times Book Review, February 12, 1939, p. 6. Krause is comparable to Thomas Wolfe as realist and poet.
Bibliography
Dunmire, Raymond V., compiler. The Herbert Krause Collection Bibliography. Vol. 1 (1975), Vol. 2 (1976). Sioux Falls, South Dakota: Augustana College Mikkelsen Library and Learning Resources Center.
Theses
Baylor, Leslie M. "The Functions of Nature in Herbert Krause's Pockerbrush Novels." M.A. Thesis, Idaho State University, 1965. Krause depicts nature as an orderly and ongoing process; he uses metaphors, similes, and description as clarification rather than ornamentation.
Christensen, Vi Ann Sattre. "The German Immigrant as Portrayed in the Novels of Herbert Krause." M.A. Thesis, Mankato State College, 1968. As a "second-generation" German, Krause recalls much that is authentic in German language and lore.
Solovskoy, Valborg Berge. "The World of Nature in the Writings of Herbert Krause." M.S. Thesis, Mankato State College, 1973. Nature plays a highly significant role in Krause's novels, both as an antagonist to man and as a source of beauty and hope; his later scientific writing is almost exclusively ornithological. Includes two long interviews.
Upton, Barbara Roberts. "A Study of the Works of Herbert Krause with Special Emphasis on The Thresher." M.S. Thesis, Mankato State College, 1963. Based on a number of interviews with Krause. Evaluates his theology.
Unpublished Sources
The Herbert Krause Papers. Letters, manuscripts, galley proofs, photos, notes, class lectures, and the Krause Collection of Western Americana are in the Center for Western Studies, Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
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