KIELLAND, ALEXANDER LANGE

born Feb. 18, 1849, Stavanger, Nor. died April 6, 1906, Bergen novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist, one of the big four (with Henrik Ibsen, B.M. Bjrnson, and Jonas Lie) of 19th-century Norwegian literature. The scion of an aristocratic family, Kielland took a law degree in 1871 and purchased a brickyard, which he managed for nine years. Discontented, he went to Paris in 1878 and the next year published a collection of his short stories. Kielland had read widely in the literature of 19th-century liberalism, and he dedicated his creative energies to social criticism and reform. Kielland was perhaps the foremost Norwegian prose stylist of his day, and the witty and ironic temper of his work often took the edge off his biting social criticism. His most important novels are Garman and Worse (1880), in which he depicts the life of his native city of Stavanger; Arbeidsfolk (1881; Working People), in which he attacks Norway's state bureaucracy; Skipper Worse (1882), another portrait of his native Stavanger; and Sankt Hans fest (1887; St. John's Festival), in which he satirizes the hypocrisy of Norway's clergy. Kielland's hostile attitude toward the church was influenced by the philosopher Sren Kierkegaard; he never attacked Christianity, only the worldliness and dishonesty of its clerical representatives. After the emergence in the 1890s of the Neo-Romantic movement, which was a revolt against naturalism and the social-reforming novel, Kielland published very little. In 1891 he was elected mayor of his hometown and in 1902 district governor of Romsdal.