Martinson, Harry Edmund (1904-1978), a Swedish novelist and poet, shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for literature with Swedish author Eyvind Johnson. Martinson became known for his working-class novels, which were largely based on his own life. His best fiction deals with impoverished characters seeking freedom and personal integrity, often unsuccessfully.
Martinson was born in Jamshog, Sweden. He spent much of his youth in foster homes. As a young man, he worked as a merchant seaman and laborer and often was a vagrant. He wrote about his difficult early life in two autobiographical novels, Flowering Nettle (1935) and The Way Out (1936) as well as in travel sketches published in Travels Without a Destination (1932) and Cape Farewell (1933). Martinson is best known in Sweden for The Road (1948), a philosophical novel that takes place during the early years of industrialization. His poetry appears in such collections as Ghost Ship (1929) and Trade Wind (1945). He also wrote an epic poem about space travel, Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space (1956).
