Hjalmar Söderberg

Hjalmar Emil Fredrik Söderberg was born on July 2, 1869, in Stockholm. Working as a literary critic and journalist, his crystalline, ironic prose and melancholic wanderings through the gas-lit boulevards of Stockholm established him as the supreme chronicler of the turn-of-the-century capital.

His 1905 novel Doktor Glas—a psychological diary of a physician contemplating the moral murder of a repulsive clergyman to protect a suffering woman—provoked immense moral outrage while anticipating modern existentialism. His 1912 novel Den allvarsamma leken (The Serious Game) is widely regarded as the greatest love story in Swedish literature. In his later Copenhagen years, Söderberg wrote courageous scholarly critiques warning against the rising threat of Nazism.