Customer Reviews

The Western Home: A LITERARY HISTORY OF NORWEGIAN AMERICA (Authors Series (Norwegian-American Historical Association), V. 8.)

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Overland has slogged through who knows how many stacks of books, newspapers, letters, etc to arrive at this thorough history of Norwegian-American literature. I will say this is not a light, pleasurable read for the casual Norwegian-American hoping to get to know their ancestors better. This book is painstaking in recounting what reading material exactly was available to Scandi-Americans on the prairie. If you are working on a novel or a film, this kind of historical specificity is precious. There were some facts that stirred the heart: the fact that some American farmers for the first time picked up a pen and put it to paper. I am very grateful to Overland for compiling all this cultural data into one book. If you are super into Norwegian-Americans, American literature, mid-nineteeth century America...this is a must read.

"The Western Home - A Literary History of Norwegian America" by Orm Øverland, © 1996

It always surprising when a book catches your interest. I thought this would be an odd history, and it is, but it is also very well written and interesting.
The main subject is the writing done here in America by immigrant Norwegians: poetry, prose, newspaper articles, songs, etc, and written in Norwegian. It is very nice of the author or publisher to write this book and translate the specific items to English, so those of us who speak that language can enjoy the story. It is concerned with what was written here in the New World (Vesterheim or Western Home) in Norwegian, so there was a lot of translation to be done. There was quite a bit written in English as well, as could be expected, but that can be written of in another appropriate place.
The book starts out with an overview of the history of Norwegian immigration and how they began to write for their own entertainment. He goes on to explain how some newspapers would publish about anything sent in, worthy or not, just because there was such an appreciation of each others efforts by the readers (that is what helped sell issues). His explanation of the poetry that was printed and published as a book is funny. The compiler of one book of poems must have read a lot of 'doggerel' to get what he ended up with, which was not that great. Prof. Øverland goes into the quality and persistence of certain stories written over here by various authors. Some were quite good and worthy of reading, but a lot were just ways to pass time between chores and it shows. Prof. Øverland is good at putting the quality of the production, be it poetry or novels or newspapers, in perspective. All of these people are passed on, and the survivors are probably happy to see some recognition of what the authors did, even if it is negative, but it also means that there are no hurt feelings or slander suits, etc. to be dealt with.
Prof. Øverland ends the book with various simple histories of prominent authors. It is good because he can play off expectations each had for the other as he goes from one to the next, building a very good story behind the story. It ends with the demise of the whole Vesterheim issue. Because a lot of what the Norwegians who came here wanted to build was another Norway, or some semblance of it. It did not work out that way, and with the anti-foreigner frenzy of World War I (exemplified by attacking non-English languages), it was not going to be easy at all. In the end all Norwegians became Americans.