Stig Dagerman (1923–1954) was the literary wunderkind of his generation in Sweden. By the time he was twenty-six, Dagerman’s literary corpus consisted of four novels, a collection of short stories, a book of literary journalism, four full-length plays, and several volumes’ worth of uncollected essays, poetry, and stories. Surpassed in Swedish literature perhaps only by August Strindberg’s in terms of its compressed intensity, Dagerman’s remarkable literary output came to an abrupt end when, at the age of thirty-one, he died of suicide.