Literary Career
Bengtsson began as a poet, with his debut work Tärningskast (Throwing Dice) published in 1923. In 1929 he published an essay collection titled Litteratörer och Militärer (Writers and Warriors) with contributions on François Villon, Walter Scott, Joseph Conrad, and Stonewall Jackson. His essays mainly dealt literary and historical subjects. A selection was translated into English in 1950 and published as A Walk to an Ant Hill and Other Essays.
His biography on the Swedish king Charles XII (Karl XII:s levnad) 1932 is his magnum opus. He describes the king through excerpts from contemporary diaries by officers and common soldiers, and from a wealth of quotes from the published literature. Bengtsson's work draws heavily on the biography of Charles XII by Voltaire published in 1731, thirteen years after the king’s death.
Later, Bengtsson became widely known for his Viking saga novel Röde Orm (The Long Ships), published in two parts in 1941 and 1945. The hero Orm, later called Röde Orm (Red Snake) because of his red beard, is kidnapped as a boy onto a raiding ship and leads an exciting life in the Mediterranean area around the year 1000 AD. Later, he makes an expedition eastward into what is now Russia.
Bengtsson once said: "Joan of Arc, Charles XII, and Garibaldi are the persons I would like to meet - for them the truth was more important than intrigues."
Read more about this topic: Frans G. Bengtsson
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or career:
“She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)