[1] The novel tells the story of Per Sidenius, a self-confident, richly gifted man who breaks with his religious family and the constraints of his heritage and social background in order to become an engineer.
For the character of Per Sidenius, Pontoppidan drew on his own history as a Jutlandic vicar's son who traveled to Copenhagen to train as an engineer before becoming an author.
[2] The novel was well received by German literati such as Thomas Mann, Georg Lukács, and Ernst Bloch, who considered it "a cosmopolitan masterpiece of epochal sweep and a profound social, psychological, and metaphysical anatomy of the modernist transition".
Danish director Bille August's film adaptation of the novel is also called A Fortunate Man in its English language version and was released in the late summer of 2018.
Per also meets the charismatic Dr. Nathan, a fictionalized version of the intellectual Georg Brandes, who influences Per with his progressive ideals of bringing the future to Denmark.
Although sympathetic, Per eventually rejects Dr. Nathan's influence, as he comes to see him as a representative of a purely humanistic intellectualism with no interest in science and technological progress.
He lives the last years of his life in ascetic contemplation in western Jutland while carrying out the dreary work of a civil servant.