At the beginning of the twentieth century, in the poverty-stricken Swedish region of Smaland, young Valter, the son of a soldier, explores the world around him and watches his older brothers emigrate to America. In this novel of the life of a farm boy, first published in three volumes in 1946, Vilhelm Moberg sensitively explores his own childhood.
When Valter, a boy with great imagination, describes the exciting things he sees so vividly, he is punished for lying, so he learns to write his stories down instead. He willingly leaves school and helps support his family by working in lumber camps and a glass factory. His father's ill health and death bring even harder times. Through all his toil, he debates whether to honor his father's wish and remain in Sweden to support his mother.
With gentle irony and a loving knowledge of the landscape, the people, and the larger issue of class struggle, Moberg offers American readers a deeply moving view of the other side of Swedish immigration.
Vilhelm Moberg, Swedish author, playwright, and historian, was the author of the four-volume Emigrants series, which was also translated into English by Gustaf Lannestock.

In the second volume of his vivid history of the Swedes, Vilhelm Moberg brings his focus on the common people to bear on a period that included two dramatic revolts: the national insurrection under Engelbrekt and the last desperate attempt of the Smaland peasantry to retain their medieval liberties - a defiance bloodily crushed by King Gustav Vasa. Using a wide variety of local historical source materials, Moberg studies the ruthless monarch Vasa and his two tragic opponents: the psychopathic Christian II of Denmark and Nils Dracke, the leader of the Smalanders. Furthermore, he examines the enigmatic and wide appeal of the Swedish forest and investigates the origins of the Swedish hatred of Danes, which was implanted by propaganda through songs commissioned by Karl VIII's chancellery. Moberg's history has been widely hailed by the Swedish press as a masterpiece of popular history writing and has been an all-time best-seller in Swedish bookstores.

Beginning in prehistoric times and culminating with the Dacke rebellion of 1542, renowned novelist Vilhelm Moberg's two-volume popular history of the Swedish people approaches its subject from the viewpoint of the common people, documenting peasants' lives as well as those of the royal families. In this first volume Moberg examines Viking raids, the coming of Christianity, and the Folkungs royal dynasty, whose tyrannical reign lasted from 1250 to the 1360s. He vividly describes the arrival of the Black Death from a ship that docked carrying only dead passengers, and he recounts the reign of Queen Margareta who founded the Kalmar Union, comprising all of Scandinavia. In every chapter, Moberg faithfully imparts how history affected "the whole people" of Sweden.