The aspiring author meets the metropolis: Self and the city in Eyvind Johnson’s letters and short stories, 1921-1923

The article builds on perspectives in urban sociology on the modern city as a site of both freedom and constraint as well as perspectives in urban literary criticism on the city as a system, as sense-specific, and as a place pointing to the future. These insights support the article’s core aim of unpacking the young Swedish writer Eyvind Johnson’s meeting with the Continental-European metropolis in the post-First-World-War period. This aim is realised in two steps. First, the article tracks Johnson’s subjective response to the city as well as the development of his aesthetical thinking through the lens of his correspondence from late 1921 to early 1923. Second, the article explores the literary outcome of the meeting with the metropolis in the form of a group of innovative but largely unappreciated short stories which Johnson published in newspapers during 1923. Finally, the article argues that the metropolitan experience furthered Johnson’s career as a writer, with the short fictions serving as a stepping stone towards his unique brand of expansive modernism as manifested in his subsequent book publications from the 1920s.