Martin Andersen Nexø
Martin Andersen Nexø was a Danish writer. He was one of the authors in the Modern Breakthrough movement in Danish art and literature. He was a socialist throughout his life and during the second world war moved to the Soviet Union, and afterwards to Dresden in East Germany. Martin Andersen Nexø was born on June 26, 1869 into a large family (the fourth of eleven children) in Christianshavn, at the time an impoverished district of Copenhagen. In 1877 his family moved to Nexø on Bornholm, and he adopted the name of this town as his last name. Having been an industrial worker before, in Nexø he attended a folk high school, and later worked as a journalist. He spent the mid-1890s travelling in Southern Europe, and his book Soldage (1903) (English: Days in the Sun) is largely based on those travels. Like many of his literary contemporaries, including Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Nexø was at first heavily influenced by fin-de-siècle pessimism, but gradually turned to a more extroverted view,...
