writing of his autobiography--a long and interesting work.

Halldór Kiljan Laxness was born in 1902 in Reykjavík. Shortly
afterwards his parents established themselves on a farm in the
neighbourhood where he was brought up, and where he has now built
himself a home. He is a patriot and, at the same time, a
cosmopolitan who has probably travelled more extensively abroad than
any other of his fellow-countrymen. After becoming a Catholic at the
age of twenty, he spent a year in monasteries abroad, but had
already begun to waver in his Catholicism when he first visited
America, where he stayed from 1927 to 1930. During those years he
became more and more radical in his social beliefs. Already in his
first year there, he wrote the short story New Iceland (Nýja
Ísland), which was immediately published in Heimskringla, an
Icelandic weekly in Winnipeg. The story thus dates from an early
period, when his art was in process of great development.

Indeed, the nineteen twenties saw important changes in our
literature. The last of the great nineteenth century poets were
vanishing from the literary scene, their places being taken by
others, whose poetry, though hardly as profound and lofty in
conception, was more lyrical and simple in manner, with greater
delicacy and refinement of form. Especially in the prose-writing of
the period, there were signs of flourishing growth. Gunnar
Gunnarsson wrote The Church on the Mountain, and Laxness was
becoming known. In the early thirties he appears as a fully mature
writer in Salka Valka, a political love story from a fishing
village, and Independent People (Sjálfstaett fólk), a heroic novel
about the stubbornness and the lot of the Icelandic mountain farmer,
both of which have appeared in English translations. Laxness has