Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth

Related Category: American Literature: Biographies

(hyäl´mär hyôrt boi´ĕsĕn), 1848–95, American writer, b. Norway, educated at the universities of Leipzig and Christiania (Ph.D., 1868). He came to the United States in 1869 and became editor of Fremad, a Norwegian weekly published in Chicago. Later he was a professor at Cornell and Columbia universities; his scholarly works include Goethe and Schiller (1879) and Essays on Scandinavian Literature (1895). Boyesen is best remembered for his fiction, including Gunnar (1874), a romance of Norwegian life, and such realistic urban novels as The Mammon of Unrighteousness (1891) and The Social Strugglers (1893).

See biography by C. A. Glasrud (1963).