Carl Jonas Love Almqvist

Carl Jonas Love Ludvig Almqvist (28 November 1793 – 26 September 1866) was a Swedish author, romantic poet, romantic critic of political economy, realist, composer and social critic. Biography Carl Jonas Love Almqvist was born in Stockholm, Sweden. He was the son of War Commissioner Karl Gustav Almqvist (1768–1846) and Birgitta Lovisa Gjörwell (1768–1806), daughter of journalist and editor Carl Christoffer Gjörwell Sr. (1731–1811). Almqvist’s younger half-brother was Director-General Gustavus Fridolf Almquist (1814–1886), who was the father of Agnes Hammarskjöld. He studied at Uppsala University and then worked as a clerk in Stockholm. In 1823 he gave up his post, and in the autumn of the following year moved to Adolfsfors-Köla in northern Värmland where he and some friends, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, intended to live out a rural idyll. It was there in 1824, that he married Anna Maria Andersdotter Lundström (1799–1868) and had two children. In 1828, he became a teacher at the experimental school Nya Elementar in Stockholm, where he was rector there from 1829 to 1841. Almqvist was ordained as a pastor in 1837, but could not find work, and after publishing Det går an in 1839