In this article I want to discuss the question of emigration from and immigration to Sweden, both past and present, using the series of four novels written by the working-class writer, Vilhelm Moberg (1898–1973), as a literary point of departure in order to examine in more detail the personal experience of leaving one’s homeland and moving to another.

Timber is still the country’s most important export product and has been since the nineteenth century. The population of ten million people remains also small for such a big country. Even today in Sweden there is a sharp discrepancy between town and country in which the process of urbanization has left a long trail of slowly dying villages, especially in the north. In Sweden for example the development of modern industry was delayed until well into the twentieth century. While the progress of American capitalism was given an enormous boost by the influx of so many millions of young workers, the impact on the countries they left behind was devastating. The disappearance of a whole generation of family and friends who never saw one another again felt like a premature death. Footnote 1 The sense of separation and loss resulted in something of a collective trauma both among those who left and those who stayed behind. This was the case as well in Ireland and Norway, two countries that experienced similarly high levels of emigration to America.

It was also mainly young people who left home – farm labourers and the urban working class – fleeing hunger, poverty, religious and civil persecution. This corresponded to one fifth of the whole population, making it proportionately the largest exodus of people to the US from any single country. Between 18 1.2 million people left Sweden and emigrated to America.

The emigrants book moberg