God Tempers The Wind to The Shorn Lamb

Mogens Klitgaard, who died in 1945 at the age of 39, was Denmark's leading critical-realist and  historical novelist between the world wars.  God Tempers the Wind to the Shorn Lamb is a self-ironic, largely autobiographical account of his decade-long vagabondage during the 1920s.  Having grown up in an orphanage after his middle-class parents had died by the time he was 10, he ran away from his involuntary apprenticeship as a market-gardener at 15 and bummed around Europe from Lapland to the Riviera, with stays in Stockholm, Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, Hull, and jail, working--much to his chagrin--as a farm laborer, ship's cook, tour guide, private eye, and smuggler, until tuberculosis put an end to that way of life.  Published in 1938, the novel comes to terms with the illusory freedom of the vagabond, whose life becomes as routinized and tedious as any factory or office worker's.  The Times Literary Supplement immediately lauded the Danish original for telling a "good convincing story in an excellent style."  

Translated by Marc Linder, a professor of labor law at the University of Iowa who taught for three years at Roskilde University in Denmark.