In 1967, when Finland was celebrating fifty years of independence, a new, concise literary history by Kai Laitinen was published. The work covers the five decades of independence and was due to appear simultaneously in a Swedish and a German translation. Laitinen’s Suomen kirjallisuus 1917–1967 (Literature of Finland: An Outline, in English in 1985) was thus intended to introduce to others what was then seen as a relatively unknown small nation, living in the far north on the margins of Europe behind a nearly impenetrable language barrier, and to make known its cultural achievements. After a rough beginning, with a Civil War and two wars against the Soviet Union, the story of independent Finland had proved to be a success story. In some twenty years, Finland had risen from the bitter poverty of the postwar years to ranking among the fifteen most prosperous countries in the world. A multi-party democracy had provided a basis for the construction of a Nordic type of welfare state (which would continue under favorable conditions of economic growth till the early 1990s). It seemed apposite for a country which had traditionally seen its culture, and especially its literature, as the core of its identity to celebrate its half-century of existence as a state by presenting itself to the “world” as a country possessing a rich literature of its own. With the exception of writing by Swedish-speaking Finns, which was relatively well known in Sweden, it was specifically literature, compared to the other arts, which was least familiar beyond the borders of the country. The initiative behind the new literary history thus belonged in part to the sphere of cultural politics and image creation. Fourteen years later, Laitinen’s book was followed by his Suomen kirjallisuuden historia (History of Finnish literature 1981), an extended version of the 1967 book, now comprising the entire history of Finnish literature: from oral poetry to the present. The preface reveals that the incentive for this work too came from the outside, namely, from Hungary; the volume was also published in a Hungarian and in a Polish translation. In Finland, the work has been widely used by the broad reading public and as a university textbook. In the following, the focus is on the latter of Laitinen’s works.