Giants in the Earth

A Norwegian immigrant family breaks sod in the Dakota Territory in the 1870s. Rolvaag wrote it in Norwegian, from inside the experience, and split it between two irreconcilable responses to the same prairie: Per Hansa, who reads the empty land as opportunity, and his wife Beret, for whom the absence of church, neighbours and landmarks is a spiritual catastrophe. It sits in a citizenship curriculum as the settlement story told without triumphalism — the cost side of westward expansion, written by someone whose own family paid it.

Context: Ole Edvart Rolvaag (1876-1931) emigrated from Norway in 1896, farmed in South Dakota, and taught Norwegian literature at St. Olaf College. The two Norwegian volumes appeared in 1924 and 1925; the English Giants in the Earth followed in 1927 and became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• Ole Edvart Rolvaag — the author.
• Immigration — the experience the novel is built out of.
• Frontier — the setting, and the thing being tested.
• Agriculture — the work the book is about.
• American Dream — the promise the book measures against what actually happened.