An immigrant's two worlds: a biography of Hjalmar Edgren
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| Hjalmar Edgren |
The movement of people in various periods of history provides a chronicle of the response of individuals and groups to their homeland in the context of the challenge and promise of life elsewhere.
The general pattern of immigration to the United States, which is one phase of this broader movement across the centuries, resulted generally in the permanent exchange of the old for the new as the immigrant became a part of the symphony of American life. But there were variations on this theme. One variation involved those immigrants who shared only a limited period of their lives in America and then returned to live out their years in the land of their birth.
An unusual variant to the above patterns was the rare immigrant who actually had intermittently in the two worlds of the homeland and his adopted country. Hjal- mar Edgren was one of those rare persons. The immigrants to America were diverse individuals with great variety in age, background, and culture.
A wide range of factors — economic, political, religious, and social — combined with highly personal elements to bring millions of Europeans to the New World which seemed to be "the land of the future." They contributed their talents, energy, and devotion to building America, and in the process, there were joys and sorrows, successes and failures. Most of them became tillers of the soil and workers in the industry, mines, and factories, making substantial contributions to American economic hfe. Only a few became writers, artists, musicians, physicians, ministers, and scholars. Hjalmar Edgren was one of the scholarly few.
American odyssey after he reached the age of twenty-one included the varied careers of a Union army officer in the Civil War, graduate student and teacher at Yale, professor and dean at the University of Nebraska, translator of Sanskrit and American literature, and poet.
But his American experience of more than two decades was accompanied by intermittent periods in Sweden where he was a teacher at Lund University, professor and first rector of Gdteborgs Hogskola, which became Goteborg University, member of the Nobel Institute related to the Swedish Academy awarding the Nobel Prize in literature, interpreter of American life to his countrymen, translator of world literature, and poet. Moreover, he was a good husband, father, and citizen.
Contents:
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
I. Family and Early Years 1
IL Military Service 8
III. Academic and Literary Activity, 1870-1880 15
IV. Lund and the University of Nebraska 22
V. The Years at Goteborg, 1891-1893 33
V. The Years at Goteborg, 1891-1893 33
VI. The University of Nebraska, 1893-1901 43
VII. The Nobel Institute, 1901-1903 55
VIII. The Poetry of Hjalmar Edgren 64
IX. A Composite Portrait 82
Notes 90
Index 95
August Hjalmar Edgren was a Swedish-American linguist, professor, and author
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