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Aksel Sandemose (March 19, 1899 - August 6, 1965) was a novelist, born in Nykøbing, Mors Island, Denmark to a Danish father and a Norwegian mother.

Apart from his writing, in his early years he worked as a teacher, journalist, sailor and lumberman in Newfoundland. Although his birth name was Axel Nielsen, in 1921 he changed his name to Aksel Sandemose. His new surname was a danicised version of Sandermosen, near Oslo, not far from his mother's birthplace.

His literary debut came with "Fortællinger fra Labrador" in 1923. In 1930 he settled in Norway. One year later he published his first book written in Norwegian bokmål. Although by then an established author, his definitive breakthrough came in 1933 with the novel En flyktning krysser sitt spor, ("A fugitive crosses his tracks"), (English translation 1936). As many of his other works, the novel were based upon his upbringing in Nykøbing, Mors at the beginning of the 20th century. In "A fugitive crosses his tracks" Sandemose develops one of his more famous concepts, the Jante Law, in which he depicts the collective´s suppression of the individual´s aspirations and personal development.

Sandemose remained in Norway until 1941, when his involvement in the Norwegian World War II resistance forced him to escape to Sweden. After the war Sandemose settled in the countryside near Risør in Norway.

As in "A fugitive crosses his tracks" the main theme in Sandemose's books is the kind of evil people impose on each other for the reason of narrow-mindedness and limited imagination. This is developed in a wryly humorous form, in books that mix loose stories with comments and digressions. In the book which most poignantly follows this pattern, Varulven ("The werewolf") (1958), the evil, in the form of the werewolf, eventually leads to murder just because a rigidly brought up girl can't accept unconventional magnanimity.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Aksel Sandemose", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0