ABSTRACT
The Danish author Harald Kidde was born in 1878 in the east Jutland county seat of Vejle. The son of the county road surveyor and his thirty-year younger wife, Kidde had an older sister who died prematurely from tuberculosis, and a younger brother whose political career as a conservative member of the Danish parliament was cut short by the Spanish flu in 1918. Harald himself had died of the same disease a month earlier. A half-brother, born out of wedlock to a woman his father knew before marrying Harald’s mother, served as a school teacher on the same remote island where Harald’s mother had spent an important part of her childhood; both of these connections to life on an isolated island became crucial sources of inspirationalong with Søren Kierkegaard-when Harald Kidde penned his principal work of fiction, the novel The Hero (1912).1
