Word: hamsun
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...always be a stranger among the people," Knut Hamsun once wrote prophetically. Seven years ago Norway's greatest soth century writer died an outcast, . reviled as a quisling by his own countrymen. "A more eminent disciple of Nietzsche than any German" in Thomas Mann's judgment, Knut Hamsun was a peasant's son who grew up in Norway's far north, wandered as a hobo through Illinois and the Dakotas of the '80s, and buried himself in a remote corner of Norway to write novels (Growth of the Soil, Pan, Hunger) of great depth...
Last week Norway observed the centenary of Hamsun's birth amid hesitant signs of a Hamsun renaissance. His publisher brought out a 33-volume jubilee edition of his works; the literary magazine Vinduet published a special Hamsun number; the Oslo university library opened an exhibit of Hamsun letters and manuscripts; Oslo theaters scheduled revivals of Hamsun's dramas. On the anniversary day, three flags flew-at Hamsun's farm, at the university, at the publisher's office...
...only three. Norwegians were quick to point out that "all" flags are flown on the anniversaries of such great Norwegian authors as Ibsen and Bjornson. Said the newspaper Dagbladet: "Hamsun will go down in history as one of the greatest authors. But . . . any attempt to explain away his conduct during the war would be wrong and in bad taste...
Hobo at Heart. His prize-winning novel was an idealized picture of a frontiersman's struggle with the soil, the state, society and himself. Popular critics called Hamsun a great nature writer, but other novels such as The Woman at the Pump, the story of an emasculated man living in a sexy situation (nine years before Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises), showed that Hamsun's real literary impulse, formed during his years of vagabondage, was a profound reaction to petit bourgeois life. A few years later he embraced Reaction as a political faith. His wife...
Died. Knut Hamsun, 92, 1920 Nobel Prizewinner for his novel Growth of the Soil; of a cerebral hemorrhage; in Grimstad, Norway (see FOREIGN NEWS...