Political views

Larsson develops an interest in politics and decides to try to make a living in journalism. His father:

It was the Vietnam War. Steig was young and he leaned toward the left-wing and in Sweden at the time, every town in Sweden, every Saturday the young people would be marching shouting ‘Out of Vietnam!’ Stieg was one of them and he started writing about the Vietnam War.

His views are influenced by his parents:

His grandfather was a communist and I worked with him in a factory, and soon I was a communist then. In those days, in that type of factory, you had to be a communist to survive. It was a dark place, like a Nazi-camp, but today the factory is good, but then it was a terrible place. Stieg was never a communist, his mother became a very well known social democrat. Maybe Stieg became fascinated with politics because we were a political family. 

His writing begins to focus more on politics:

To begin we discussed very much politics at the dinner table. When Stieg was 14 it was the first time I lost a discussion. He just had better arguments than his mother and I. The young learned to argue and put together their arguments during the Vietnam War time. He didn’t write fiction during these times, at least he didn’t discuss them with his mother and I then, it would be much later. I never saw any of them.