Johannes V. Jensen

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen was born in 1873 in Farsø, a village in the Himmerland district of north Jutland, the son of a veterinary surgeon, and grew up in the countryside. He went to Copenhagen to study medicine, paying his way by writing popular fiction, but after three years abandoned his studies for literature. His sister Thit Jensen also became a well-known writer.

His early novels Danskere (1896) and Einar Elkjær (1898) voiced disillusion with the modern city. The Himmerland Stories (1898–1910) returned to the people of his native region, and The Fall of the King (1900–01), a historical novel about Christian II, read the king’s irresolution as a Danish national failing. Digte (1906), with its prose poems and direct, unadorned language, established him as a pioneer of modernism in Danish poetry. Jensen travelled widely, including in the United States, and admired Walt Whitman; his essays ranged over anthropology and the theory of evolution. That interest culminated in The Long Journey (1908–22), six novels tracing humanity from the Ice Age to Columbus, which he intended in part to rescue Darwinism from its distortions.

Nominated many times over two decades, Jensen received the Nobel Prize for 1944, presented in Stockholm in December 1945. His most popular books were written before 1920; afterwards he turned increasingly to biological and philosophical studies. His racial theories have since damaged his standing, but his place in Danish letters is secure: in 1999 two leading newspapers independently named The Fall of the King the best Danish novel of the century. He died in Copenhagen in 1950.