Knut Hamsun
1859–1952
Biography
Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian novelist and one of the most influential writers of the early twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil, and across a writing life of more than seventy years he produced over twenty novels, as well as stories, plays, poetry and essays.
Early in his career he objected to realism and naturalism, arguing that fiction should explore the workings of the human mind. He is credited with pioneering psychological writing that uses stream of consciousness and interior monologue, and writers as different as Kafka, Thomas Mann and Hemingway were influenced by him. His novel Sult (Hunger, 1890) follows an impoverished writer in Christiania, now Oslo, through a long spell of hunger, and it is among the early examples of this manner. Later he wrote about everyday life in rural Norway, in the so-called Nordland novels, which use local dialect and humour.
The book on this site is Sult, and it is the place most readers begin with him. Its unnamed narrator's hunger, pride and slow mental unravelling make it a close study of a mind under strain. Hamsun's reputation is also shaped by his politics. He openly supported Nazi Germany and the German occupation of Norway, and after the war he was charged with treason. He was not convicted, partly because of doubts about his mental state and his age, but in 1948 he was heavily fined. Readers who come to his novels should know this as well as the praise.
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Books
Sult
by Knut Hamsun
In Kristiania in the 1880s a young writer who never gives his name wanders the streets half starved, trying to sell articles to the newspapers and keep his pride. Told in his own voice across four episodes of hunger, the book follows the strange turns his mind takes as want…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.