Pontoppidan << pawn TAWP ee dahn >>, Henrik (1857-1943), a Danish novelist and short-story writer, shared the 1917 Nobel Prize in literature with another Danish writer, Karl Gjellerup. The long novels The Promised Land (1895), Lucky Per (1904), and The Realm of the Dead (1916) are among Pontoppidan’s masterpieces. These novels are realistic, giving a penetrating, unflattering, and often somber picture of contemporary Danish society. Pontoppidan was concerned with the problems of individual honesty and of finding one’s own personality.
Pontoppidan was born on July 24, 1857, in Fredericia, Jutland, Denmark. He died on Aug. 21, 1943.
