Dictionary.net

An American novelist; born at Frederiksvarn, Norway, Sept. 23, 1848; died in New York, Oct. 4, 1895. After completing his university studies at Christiania, he came to the United States in 1869 and was editor of a Norwegian journal in Chicago. He returned to Europe in 1872 and studied Germanic philology at Leipsic two years; then returning to this country he was professor of German in Cornell University for six years, and then of Germanic languages and literature in Columbia College till his death. His story of Norwegian life, "Gunnar", published in the Atlantic Monthly (1873), and his "Idyls of Norway and Other Poems" (1883), give proof of his rare imaginative faculty and his deep human sympathies. Besides these, he wrote: "Tales from Two Hemispheres" (1875); "A Norseman's Pilgrimage"; "Ilka on the Hilltop and Other Stories"; "A Daughter of the Philistines".