Alexander Kielland

Alexander Lange Kielland was born on February 18, 1849, in Stavanger into one of the city's wealthiest merchant patrician dynasties. After studying law in Christiania, he owned and operated a brickworks before turning definitively to literature in the late 1870s.

Kielland burst onto the Nordic literary scene with his polished Novelletter (1879) and novels Garman & Worse (1880) and Skipper Worse (1882), which satirized clerical hypocrisy, bourgeois complacency, and pedagogical tyranny. In Gift (Poison, 1883), he exposed the dehumanizing rote learning of Latin schools. Alongside Ibsen, Bjørnson, and Lie, Kielland completed the quartet of 'The Four Greats' of Norwegian literary realism.