A Fortunate Man

A Nobel Prize-winner's unforgettable novel about a man who sheds the stifling country life of his childhood for the excitement of Copenhagen.

This masterpiece of Danish literature, admired by the likes of Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch, is now available in a new English translation.

A Fortunate Man tells the story of Per Sidenius, a Lutheran pastor's son who revolts against his family and flees the backwaters of Jutland for Copenhagen. Per is handsome, ambitious, and hungry for the technological future of the twentieth century. He studies engineering and draws up plans for a new port and new canals, for harnessing wind and wave energy to transform Denmark into a commercial giant. Fully persuaded of his own genius, Per first repels and then attracts Jakobe Salomon, a young Jewish woman whose family is eager to underwrite his plans. They fall in love and get engaged; gradually Jakobe opens Per's eyes to the wider world. Meanwhile, he also falls under the spell of Dr. Nathan, a popular philosopher who rails against the conservative powers that be. But ultimately these powers win out, Per's relationship with Jakobe founders, and he goes home to Jutland and marries a pastor's daughter. Though fortunate, he is never happy.

One of the last great nineteenth-century novels and Henrik Pontoppidan's masterpiece, A Fortunate Man anatomizes and skewers Danish society, from the small towns to the metropolis. Paul Larkin's dazzling translation brings out the wide range and full force of a novel admired by Georg Lukács and praised by Ernst Bloch as "one of the foundational texts of world literature."

This translation was funded in part by a grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.

Author: Henrik Pontoppidan
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 06/10/2025
Pages: 880
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.88lbs
Size: 7.94h x 5.15w x 1.60d
ISBN: 9781681379272

About the Author
Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) was one of Denmark's great realist writers, a member of the Modern Breakthrough movement whose works are often compared to those of Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola. The son of a clergyman, he studied engineering in Copenhagen but then left to become a teacher and writer. For his numerous novels and short stories, he won the 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Paul Larkin is a journalist, filmmaker, critic, and translator from the Danish and other Scandinavian languages. In 1997 The Gap in the Mountain... Our Journey into Europe, the six-part film series he wrote and directed as an independent production for RTÉ, won him the European Journalist of the Year Award (the overall award and the film director category). In 2008, he was awarded the Best International Director prize at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival for his Irish-language docudrama Imeacht na nIarlaí (The Flight of the Earls) starring Stephen Rea. He lives in a Gaeltacht area of County Donegal, Ireland, where Irish is the predominant language of everyday use.

Flemming Behrendt is a Danish journalist and literary critic who has written extensively about the work of Henrik Pontoppidan.