Lagerkvist wrote poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and essays of considerable expressive power and influence[citation needed] from his early 20s to his late 70s.

One of his central themes was the fundamental question of good and evil, which he examined through such figures as Barabbas, the man who was freed instead of Jesus, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.

From The Eternal Smile on, his style largely abandoned the expressionist pathos and brusque effects of his early works and there was a strong striving for simplicity, classical precision and clean telling, sometimes appearing close to naivism.

A Swedish critic remarked that "Lagerkvist and John the Evangelist are two masters at expressing profound things with a highly restricted choice of words".

In September 1940 Lagerkvist was elected a member of the Swedish Academy, succeeding Verner von Heidenstam on chair 8 in December the same year.

[2] Lagerkvist's 1944 novel Dvärgen (The Dwarf), a searching, ironic tale about evil, was the first to bring him positive international attention outside of the Nordic countries.

Barabbas (1950), which was immediately hailed as a literary masterpiece (by fellow Nobel laureate André Gide, among others) is probably Lagerkvist's most famous work.

In 1951 Pär Lagerkvist was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the artistic vigour and true independence of mind with which he endeavours in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind.".