O. E. Rölvaag

Six short stories that reveal the author's profound understanding of human motivation as it occurred during American frontier life.

Susie Doheny, an Irish Catholic, and Peder Holm, a Norwegian Lutheran, fall in love and marry in South Dakota in the 1890s. Soon their marriage is tested by drought, depression, and family bickering. Susie believes they are being tested by their fathers' God. Peder blames Susie for the timidity of her beliefs; Susie fears Peder's pride and skepticism. When political antagonism grows between the Norwegian and Irish immigrant communities, it threatens to split their marriage. Against a backdrop of hard times, crisscrossed by Populists, antimonopolists, and schemers, Rölvaag brings the struggle of immigrants into the twentieth century. In "Giants in the Earth" the Holm family strained to wrest a homestead from the land. In "Peder Victorious" the American-born children searched for a new national identity, often defying the traditions their parents fought to uphold. In "Their Fathers' God," Rölvaag's most soul-searching novel, the first-generation Americans enter a world of ruthless competition in the midst of scarcity.

Saga of the prairies dealing with the hardships of Norwegian farmers who set out in 1873 to settle in the Dakota country.

The story of Nils Vaag and his travels from a poor region of Norway to urban Minnesota in 1912.

The stirring story of a Norwegian immigrant and his wife and their lives as pioneers on the prairies of Dakota.