Gustav Wied

Who was Gustav Wied?

Gustav Johannes Wied was a Danish writer.

The fifth of the eleven children of Carl August Wied and Catha Wied, Gustav was born in Branderslev near Nakskov.

He is generally known as a critic of society and for using his writing against the establishment. The government had him imprisoned for 14 days in 1882 for a short story published in a newspaper.

His best-known work was Livsens Ondskab, depicting life in a small provincial Danish town, with the customs official Knagsted as a red-bearded satyrical Diogenes openly ridiculing the hypocrisies of the snobbish bourgeois inhabitants, and Emanual Thomsen as a tragic struggler, trying to obtain the funds needed to regain his ancestral farm. In Knagsted he created a sequel, letting Knagsted comment on contemporary fashionable society in the Bohemian spa resort of Karlsbad.

He eventually lost popularity and suffered from severe stomach aches. Badly affected by his condition and despondent, he committed suicide with an overdose of potassium cyanide in 1914.