Uppsala has produced and inspired a long line of Swedish writers, partly thanks to the university. The books below give a sense of student life, faith, and the long Swedish argument with itself.
Doctor Glas — Söderberg studied in Uppsala in the 1880s and the city seeps into all of his work, but Doctor Glas (1905) is the great Swedish novel of intellectual loneliness. Cast as the diary of a Stockholm doctor who contemplates murder to free a young woman from her detested husband, the book is short, cold, and shockingly modern — closer to Camus than to anything else in its century.
The Stockholm setting is meticulously rendered, but the moral climate is recognisable as the same austere, agnostic Lutheran air that pervades Uppsala. A Margaret Atwood introduction graces the standard English edition; it is one of the few books that has retained its capacity to disturb a hundred and twenty years on.
The Magic Lantern — Bergman's 1987 autobiography is the most candid book any major filmmaker has written about themselves. It opens with childhood years in Uppsala — his uncle's apartment on Trädgårdsgatan, the long summers at the family's country house — and the city stays as a low note throughout the rest of his life. The deans, pastors, and tradesmen of bourgeois Uppsala recur as the originals of characters in Fanny and Alexander and Wild Strawberries.
It is also a useful key to Swedish 20th-century cultural life: theatre, film, the long Lutheran shadow. Bergman writes in short, frank, sometimes shocking passages and never spares himself. The standard English translation is by Joan Tate.
The Red Room — Strindberg matriculated at Uppsala in 1867 and dropped in and out of the university for years, never finishing his degree but absorbing the late-19th-century academic world that he would attack in The Red Room (1879). The novel — a satire of Stockholm bohemian life, told through the misadventures of a young civil-servant-turned-writer — is widely considered the first modern Swedish novel.
The Uppsala chapters are brief but acid: the professors, the petty exam politics, the airless religious orthodoxy. Together with Doctor Glas it gives the best portrait we have of the city that the post-Romantic generation needed to escape from.