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Date of Birth
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19-September-1883
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Place of Birth
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Örebro
(Örebro Municipality, Örebro County, Närke, Sweden)
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Nationality
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Sweden
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Also know as
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Hjalmar Fredrik Elgérus Bergman, Hjalmar Fredrik Elgérus Bergman
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Profession
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Writer, Novelist
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Hjalmar Fredrik Elgérus Bergman was a Swedish writer and playwright.
The son of a banker in Örebro, Bergman briefly studied philosophy at Uppsala University but soon broke off his studies and took up the life of a free writer. He married Stina Lindberg, the daughter of actor and stage producer August Lindberg. Up to his father's death in 1915 Bergman was heavily sponsored by the family patriarch; after the old man died from a stroke it turned out that the family business had become highly indebted and Bergman was forced to start making money out of his writing and court readers in a more outgoing and more entertaining manner. He rose to the challenge and in the following ten years reached the peak of his work.
Much of his output takes place in a small town in mid-Sweden, which is growing into a parallel universe in a Balzacian manner. The shameful secrets of a dozen of interwoven families gradually come out of the closet as the stories grow increasingly symbolic. A pessimistic outlook is always counterbalanced by a grotesque humour - indeed in a book like Markurells i Wadköping the latter almost succeeds in completely shading the former.
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