In 1945 Moberg began background study for what became the emigrant tetralogy and appears to have started actual work on the novels two years later.8 The first volume Utvandrarna (The Emigrants) appeared in 1949, followed in 1952 by Invandrarna (Unto a Good Land). The final volumes Nybyggarna (The Settlers) and Sista brevet till Sverige (The Last Letter Home) were published in 1956 and 1959. The author often referred to these books as a single work, the Emigrant Novels (Utvandrarromanen), and insisted that they be read as a documentary novel.
To ensure the verisimilitude of his story, Moberg did extensive historical research in both Sweden and the United States. He studied county records in Småland and read many collections of letters that immigrants in America had sent to relatives in Sweden during the nineteenth century. His studies also included trips to the Maritime Museum in Gothenburg. This research gave him a record of living conditions in nineteenth-century Sweden and a feel for life aboard sailing vessels in the days when emigration had not yet become an industry backed by large steamship companies.
Some readers have felt that The Emigrants is the most successful of the four volumes largely because Moberg was writing about his home turf, the Smålandish countryside. No one can doubt that his novel gives an accurate and inspired account of the way the author’s predecessors lived and saw the world. From a Minnesota point of view, the reader is reminded that this first volume carefully traces the customs of the Smålanders, who were the most numerous of the Swedish immigrants to this state and whose descendants still make up the largest number of Minnesota’s ethnic Swedes.
In order to build a historical framework in which his characters Karl Oskar and Kristina could move in the New World and especially in frontier Minnesota, Moberg embarked in 1948 on a study trip through the United States. An inexperienced traveler with little knowledge of English, he nevertheless gathered an impressive array of documentation that placed his immigrants in the mainstream of frontier experience.
Moberg carried out his studies in the archives of the Swedish-American museum in Philadelphia, among the Swedes of Minnesota, and through back issues of Swedish-American newspapers. His firsthand contacts with Swedish Americans in Chisago and Washington counties afforded him invaluable information on the lives of those people’s immigrant forebears. Unto a Good Land places the immigrants on American soil. The Settlers and The Last Letter Home offer an accurate overview of pioneer life in Minnesota. These novels give details of a riverboat trip up the Mississippi River, the challenge of staking out a claim in the wilderness, the devastation of grasshopper plagues, the fear of Indians, the pace of life during the Civil War, and the difficulties faced by European immigrants in adjusting to the culture of the New World.
Moberg left nothing to chance in documenting the daily life and historical events of Minnesota from 1850 (when Karl Oskar and Kristina arrive in Minnesota) until 1890 (when Karl Oskar dies). The novelist’s friends in Minnesota told of receiving letters from him inquiring about the nature of thunderstorms in the state, the cost of postage stamps in the nineteenth century, the number of daylight hours in summer, as well as distances between different parts of the state. Moberg even insisted that friends show him firsthand what animals strange to a Swede, such as crickets and skunks, looked like.9 Indeed so insistent was Moberg that his fictional tale also be used as instructional history that he appended a bibliography of his sources to the Swedish edition of the Emigrant Novels. In this Borealis Books edition that bibliography is published for the first time in English.
On only one major historical point did Moberg allow the exigencies of plot construction to interfere with the dictates of historical accuracy. There are no known cases of a group of Swedish settlers journeying directly to and settling permanently in Minnesota prior to 1860. At midcentury the pattern of Swedish migration in the Midwest invariably included an initial stay of several years in Illinois or Iowa. Only after the immigrants had gotten their feet on the ground among fellow countrymen in those states did they venture up the Mississippi to more remote Minnesota. In taking Karl Oskar and his group straight from the East Coast to Minnesota, Moberg emphasized the true, hardy pioneer nature of his characters’ journey.
Writing the Emigrant Novels
Like the fictional Karl Oskar, Moberg himself wanted to be the first on the scene. He saw himself as a literary discoverer and pioneer, a fact that presents some intriguing questions to American readers. Knowing something of Moberg’s personal relationship with America can serve as a helpful guide in understanding some of the themes he developed in the Emigrant Novels.
“We’re off to a good start,” Moberg told reporters in Stockholm as he departed on his first trip to the United States in June 1948.10 On that occasion, he entertained friends and journalists by playing the harmonica. For better or for worse, he was unable always to maintain such high spirits during the years after his arrival in America. Indeed his own meeting with America was one of joy mixed with bitter disappointment.
Moberg’s period of legal residence in the United States lasted from 1948 to 1955. During that time he held two different immigrant visas and spoke repeatedly of settling permanently. As he told one Swedish reporter: “That which I find most attractive [in America] is the sense of freedom. It appears to me as if the authorities here have more respect for the individual than at home, and I like that.”11
Gustaf Lannestock, Moberg’s translator, wrote of the novelists’s high hopes of gaining wealth and fame in the United States. Lannestock argued that Moberg in the late 1940s envisioned a promising future for himself as a writer and an adopted son of America until his aspirations were suddenly disappointed in the mid-1950s by a series of personal reverses, chiefly in disagreements with his American publishers, who Moberg felt had unjustifiably censored the Emigrant Novels.12
It now seems clear, however, that Moberg — to his own surprise — began experiencing mixed emotions about the New World as early as 1948. On one hand he admired the material success of Americans and appreciated the generosity of ordinary citizens. Especially appealing to him was the sense of independence and self-reliance exhibited by American workers. In America he found none of the obsequiousness toward the monied classes so common in Sweden. Here a man was judged “for what he can do.”13
On the other hand some aspects of American life proved to be less agreeable. The oppressive summer heat, the perceived absence of a vital literary life among the common people, and the conservative religious politics of middle America were among Moberg’s earliest complaints. By the beginning of the 1950s, his dissatisfaction extended to the political sphere. He was angered by the disruption caused by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hunt for Communists and responded with disgust when Charlie Chaplin was expelled from the country for his leftist sympathies. In an exasperating personal confrontation in 1955, the Internal Revenue Service in New York required Moberg to deposit nine thousand dollars as a lien against possible back taxes before he could return to Sweden for a visit.
Moberg’s general views on the United States were crystallized in his attitudes toward two states: Minnesota and California. He returned to Minnesota several times after his initial 1948 visit. He found the people hard-working. Swedish farmers in Minnesota had opened up more land for cultivation in a hundred years than farmers in Sweden had managed since the Viking Age, Moberg stated with pride. The Swedish settlement areas and the Småland-like countryside around Lindstrom in central Chisago County appealed to him. Visits to Swedish cemeteries in Minnesota inspired some of his most poetic nonfictional accounts of America as he imagined the lives and deaths of his beloved Swedish farmers in fields far from home.