The Daily Alaska empire., 1931-12-10
GREAT AUTHOR DIES.

One of Americas greatest novelists passed before his time when Ole Edvart Rovaag died. For twenty five years he had been Professor of Norwegian Lan guage and Literature at St. Olaf College at North field, Minnesota but he was best known for three books which he wrote in Norwegian and which were translated They were Giants in the Earth, "Peder Victorious and His Fathers God"
 Until 1927 Ole Edvart Rolvaag only pro- lessor in small Minnesota college with repu- tation among his colleagues and his countrymen, but in that year after the publication of Giants in the Earth he found himself saluted suddenly perhaps the greatest of all writers of pioneers who developed the West.
 In that book, critics everywhere agreed, he told better than it had been told the story of the Norwegians, his own people, who left their homes and created farm empire on the praires. He pumbed the dspth of their attachment to the earth, the love of the soil and the sea. He sounded the impulses which drove them to leave the fatherland, and traced accurately and sympathetically, their troubles of adjustment in the country, their Encouragement and the sense of featy to the earth Since Giants in the Earth" MT Rovaag had written two more books, following the fortunes of the children. his characters in his first novel, "Peder Victorious" which published in 1929, and Their Fathers God" published only few weeks ago.
 His own life surcharged his stories with authentic ity He rose to his eminence in letters from tiny fishing village the Morse coast-a hamlet in Helgeand under the Arctic Circle, named Rolvaag after the generations of his family which had lived there.
 He had no clear purpose in coming to America. Anything new welcome, he said in after years. He landed in New York, twenty years old with 10 cents in his pocket and perhaps 100 English words at his command. Somehow he got to North Dakota and went to work for his uncle
 After nine years of farm work and study he was graduated from St. Olafs College in 1905 and re- turned to Oslo to study for year more In 1906 he accepted the chair of St. Olafs which he held until his death
 He wrote his first novel when he was a senior in college and many others books in later years, but they were mostly about Norwegian subjects and were never translated into English All those years he was storing up the experience which found ex- pression in Giants in the Earth"
 The story is of Per Hansa the stalwart Morse man who helped build the West and his wife. Beret, sensitive woman who lacked the vision of her husband, and yearned for her old home Of the book MT Rolvaag once said:
 AS l look over American history I see
 two movements looming above all others,
 the Westward movement and the movement
 of immigration In my novel I wanted
 to picture these two in As was weav-
 ing these two into one, I tried to show
 Tn living pictures the plus and minus of
 empire building. So I married these two
 human beings I married these two ideas
 the plus and the minus of empire build
 ing-and let them work out their destnies
 the Dakota plains.
 My problem was how to keep them true
 to their race yet universalized to such an
 extent that any pioneer of any race could
 find himself in those pioneers AS Per
 Hansa wanted to picture the pioneer who
 really built the West, and at the same time
 wanted to make him true to the people
 from whom he had sprung-the people from
 Helgeland from whom had come myself
 Per Hansa is the symbol of the builder
 Of all lands, one constantly looking for