Word: hamsun
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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...
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...
...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...
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...