Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (1848–1895) was born in Fredriksvern, Norway, and educated at the universities of Leipzig and Christiania. He emigrated to the United States in 1869, working first as an editor for a Norwegian-language weekly in Chicago before turning to academia: he taught German at Cornell from 1874, becoming a full professor the following year, and later at Columbia, where he was appointed professor of German in 1883. His novel Gunnar: A Tale of Norse Life (1874) is often called the first novel published by a Norwegian immigrant in America; Tales from Two Hemispheres (1877) collects his early short fiction. He published some twenty-five books in all — novels, stories, poems and literary criticism — before his death in New York.