Knut Hamsun

Born Knud Pedersen on 4 August 1859 in Lom, Gudbrandsdalen, Norway, the fourth of seven children in a poor family, Knut Hamsun was sent at the age of nine to live with his uncle on the island of Hamarøy in Nordland, above the Arctic Circle, where he endured years of near-servitude and relentless physical labor. He had almost no formal education. He worked as a peddler, shoemaker’s apprentice, sheriff’s assistant, and schoolteacher before twice emigrating to America , first in 1882, then in 1886 , where he labored as a farmhand in North Dakota, a streetcar conductor in Chicago, and a store clerk in Minneapolis, and contracted tuberculosis. He returned to Scandinavia determined to destroy literary realism from within. In a landmark 1891 lecture tour, he attacked Ibsen and the realist school, arguing that literature must render “the whisper of blood and the pleading of bone marrow” , the irrational, fragmentary life of the unconscious mind. Hunger (1890), his breakthrough novel, narrated the disintegrating psyche of a starving young writer in Christiania with an immediacy that anticipated stream of consciousness decades before Joyce. Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and Victoria (1898) followed in rapid succession. Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect.” He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil (1917), a pastoral epic of Norwegian pioneer life. His later decades were shadowed by his fervent support for Nazi Germany , he sent his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels, met Hitler personally, and published a laudatory obituary of Hitler in 1945. After the war, he was found mentally impaired and fined heavily rather than imprisoned. He died on 19 February 1952 at Norholm, his farm near Grimstad, at ninety-two.