Complete edition Parts I to IV I. Boyhood II. Apprenticeship III. The Great Struggle IV. Daybreak. Martin Andersen Nexo 1869-1954 was born in the slums of Copenhagen into extreme poverty. He was the fourth of eleven children. His father, a stone mason, was an alcoholic and his mother was a daughter of a blacksmith. When he was eight, the family moved to the town of Nexo on the island of Bornholm, whose name he adopted in 1894 as his own. His breakthrough work, the Danish classic Pelle the Conqueror, appeared between 1906 Part I and 1910 Part IV. It tells the story of Pelle, a poor boy, whose life in Part I shares much similarities with Nexo's. The great charm of the book lies in the fact that the writer knows the poor from within he has not studied them as an outsider may, but has lived with them and felt with them, at once a participant and a keen-eyed spectator. He is no sentimentalist, and so rich is his imagination that he passes on rapidly from one scene to the next, sketching oft