Lucky Per

Pontoppidan's (1857-1943) novel Lykke Per was written in 1898-1904, and was described as seminal in modern world literature by such figures as Thomas Mann and George Lucacs, but has not been translated into English until now. It portrays the interaction and conflict between political and social forces, and the interplay of ideas at the turn of the century. Lebowitz (emerita humanities, Washington U., St. Louis) translates from the Danish into very readable English, and provides end notes explaining contemporary references. Pontoppidan shared the 1917 Nobel Prize for literature with fellow Dane Karl Adolph Gjellerup. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Naomi Lebowitz is the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, where she regularly taught courses in world literature. Receiver of many awards, including a Guggenheim and AAUW fellowship, she is the author of books on Henry James, Soren Kierkegaard, Italo Svevo, and Henrik Ibsen, chapters on Michel de Montaigne, William James, George Santayana, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Gustave Flaubert, Joseph Conrad, and E. M. Forster, and articles on Honore de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Andre Gide, Martin Andersen Nexo, and Henrik Pontoppidan, among others. In 2007, she received the Leif and Inger Sjoberg Award from the American Scandinavian Foundation for her translation of chapter excerpts from Lucky Per, which the judges termed highly readable and long overdue.