Independent People

Independent People is a novel by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness, published in Icelandic in two volumes in 1934 and 1935, following the sheep farmer Bjartur of Summerhouses across roughly two decades as he pursues his singular ambition to own his land and owe nothing to any man. Having worked eighteen years as a shepherd to save for his own croft, built on land locally believed cursed, Bjartur endures the death of his first wife Rosa in childbirth, remarries, and raises a large family in grinding poverty, prizing his stubborn self-sufficiency over his family's wellbeing and driving away several of his own children in the process, before economic collapse after the First World War costs him the farm itself. Laxness wrote the novel as a work of social realism sharply critical of the romantic nationalist idealization of the independent Icelandic farmer, portraying Bjartur's fierce individualism as both admirable and self-destructive within an economic system that made genuine independence for smallholders nearly impossible. Widely regarded as Laxness's masterpiece, Independent People is central to the body of work that earned Laxness the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.