Sweden in the late 1800s had been an impoverished, largely agrarian society where traditions and ingrained conservative attitudes remained unchanged for centuries. In this environment, reading for pleasure — let alone writing — was regarded at best as a useless pursuit that stole time from honest toil, and at worst as sinful. Fiction and poetry, after all, did not relate 'true' events, but were fabulations, lies.
The first decade or so of the new century, however, the period corresponding with the childhood and youth of most of these future authors, was a period of profound social change. The coming of urbanization and industrialization brought about the political rise of the socialist movement, which had a powerful effect even in agricultural districts since it emphasized solidarity among all working-class people. The socialist movement regarded the education of the masses as one of its major goals.
By promoting reading and discussion groups, it encouraged people to read and write; leftist newspapers, furthermore, were often willing to publish fiction and poetry by unknown or unpolished proletarian writers even if it was not directly polemic.
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In a broader sense, the powerful impact of this generation of writers in the 1930s, regardless of their specific party loyalties, corresponds with the rise to political dominance of the Social Democratic party during the same decade. The establishment of the Welfare State made possible an environment in which workers, and working-class writers, could become part of the mainstream.
