Their work, influenced by writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot and the events during World War II, marked the breakthrough and establishment of Modernist Swedish literature.
Other prominent representatives was Stig Dagerman, the poet Werner Aspenström, novelist Lars Ahlin and critic Lennart Göthberg.
A central work is Erik Lindegren's surreal "shattered sonnets" in mannen utan väg (The Man Without a Way, 1942) that expresses the despair and desillusion of the time.
The form and language of modernist works such as Lindegren's mannen utan väg was attacked as "incomprehensible" by older critics, which resulted in a heated debate.
The debate was further fuelled when Camera obscura (1946) by Jan Wictor (a pseudonym for Lars Gyllensten and a friend), a work that many critics took seriously, turned out to be a parody of modernist poetry.