Word: hamsun
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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American." In neutral Norway in World War I, Hamsun went into retirement to write his major work, Growth of the Soil, which brought him the 1920 Nobel Prize. He gave away the prize money, refused to be interviewed. Said he "In 100 years I shall be forgotten...
...Luck. His name was Pedersen. He had signed his first poems "Hamsund," after his family farm, but a careless printer dropped the final 'd' off an early byline and he stuck to the misprinted name for luck. Meatpacker Armour's $25 was one of Knut Hamsun's rare breaks in the U.S.; in 1888, he returned to Norway to write of his disenchantment with the U.S. of booming stockyards and cornlands. He had found no cultural life in the U.S., only "prudishness, self-complacent ignorance," and "patriotism engendered by tin fifes...
...Europe, as in the U.S., Hamsun went hungry. One day he walked into the Copenhagen office of Editor Edvard Brandes, who later wrote "I have seldom seen a man more derelict in appearance. But that face! . . . The expression on his quivering pale face haunted me." The manuscript Hamsun gave Brandes was the story of a writer starving to death in a big city. Published as Hunger it brought Hamsun world recognition. Other novels followed. They were written in a simple, austere, almost laconic style, but with passages of high lyricism and great narrative power. European critics found...