Carl Jonas Love Almqvist

Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (Sweden, 1793 - Germany, 1866), was both a romantic poet, feminist, realist, composer, social critic and traveler. Some of his views are surprisingly modern, after two centuires his thoughts about the equality of men and women are sometimes more modern than the ones we have today.

During his life he found the time to write quite a few books and poems. Among them were some that dealt with his radical views on society and politics. These books made the church and state condemn him and call him a dangerous revolutionary. However, he still maintained power with his writings, and he is counted as one of the foremost of the swedish social reformers in the nineteenth century.

His enemies tried all the harder to bring him low, and this might have been accomplished when he was accused of having tried to murder a shady business acquaintance with arsenic. If he was guilty or not will never be known, but he did panic and flee to the United States, where he spent most of his latter years. There he took a new identity and married, and lived a life of obscurity in self-imposed exile. In 1865 he returned to Europe, took another identity and died in Germany the following year.