“Bitter enemy" of the State: The American Political and Literary Reception of Halldór Laxness
Abstract
This article maps the American reception and erasure of the Icelandic novelist and Nobel Laureate Halldór Laxness, revealing a complex transnational literary and political conflict rooted in Cold War tensions between Iceland and the US. After World War II, the American military outpost in Iceland became a site of contact and contestation in the newly independent nation. During the 1940s and 50s, Laxness was at the center of this discourse as he critiqued Iceland’s move toward a military alliance with the US and its entry into NATO. This article offers a bilateral reading of this controversy, examining Laxness’s political essays and his prescient novel The Atom Station (1948) in dialogue with American newspapers and declassified government documents. Recovering the story of Laxness’s literary suppression and his scrutiny by the American government provides new insights into Cold War cultural containment with implications that extend beyond the writer himself, expanding the study of anti-Communist repression and foregrounding a lesser-known site of literary resistance to the rising American military-industrial complex.