Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays

1

Dagerman was born in 1923 to working-class parents outside the village of Älvksrleby. Dagerman’s mother abandoned him when he was still a baby, and he was raised by his grandparents. At twelve, he moved to Stockholm to live with his father and became active in the youth organization of the Syndicalist Union. When he was sixteen, a lunatic murdered his beloved grandfather, and his grandmother died not long after. Between the ages of twenty and twenty-six, Dagerman wrote four novels, four plays, a collection of stories, articles, essays, and poems. In 1946, he traveled in Germany and wrote German Autumn, a strikingly human portrait of the country after the war. His prolific abilities, however, began to wane, and he suffered from writer’s block. In 1954, at age thirty-one, suffering from depression and perhaps schizophrenia, he committed suicide. Although his work has been translated into English and is admired by many writers in England and America, Dagerman’s fame has been mostly confined to Europe. This is sad because he is a writer of uncommon urgency and power.