Harry Martinson: Dreaming about Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon: Swedish Roots in Oregon, 2002. Soft cover. Near Fine. Staple-bound in card covers. Lightly handled, but clean. Includes a few illustrations. 23 pages. Seven institutional copies located on OCLC (including National Library of Sweden). A short study about the Swedish writer and 1974 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Harry Martinson (1904-1978), which sets out to describe what happened to his family around the time his father died in 1910, his mother's new life in Portland, Oregon (where she arrived in 1911), and how he dealt with this trauma in some of his books. Includes references and a bibliography of Martinson's books in English translation. Following the death of her husband, Harry's mother fled to America and settled in Portland, met (and was presumed to have married) a Swede named Herman Ernest Johnson, and by 1915 had opened a restaurant called Betty's Restaurant. Her business moved several times and around 1925, now called Betty's Lunch, was located at the News Depot in the Multnomah Hotel building. Harry attempted to contact her in 1922, after years of being a foster child and a vagrant, but received no reply from her.