Johannes V. Jensen
Denmark
Muscular, sensuous prose that jumps from reportage to vision mid-page: geology and myth spoken in one breath.
A veterinarian's son from Farsø in Jutland's Himmerland, Jensen abandoned medical studies for journalism and never stopped moving (America, the East, world's fairs) while his Himmerland Stories turned the home district into legend. The Fall of the King, his splintered Renaissance novel of Danish defeat, was later voted his country's novel of the century.
He invented a genre he simply called 'myths': short prose that leaps from observation to vision in a page. The Long Journey (1908–22) built the method into an epic of the species itself, its ice-age and seafaring heroes discovering fire, ships, longing, and gods.
His essays on evolution and race have aged far worse than his prose, which renovated modern Danish. The Nobel came in 1944, deliverable only once the occupation ended; he died in Copenhagen in 1950.
Their books in the atlas
- 1922
The Long JourneyLvl 6epic
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