Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 - February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian author. He was considered by Isaac Bashevis Singer to be the "father of modern literature", and by King Haakon to be Norway's soul. In 1920, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil". He insisted that the intricacies of the human mind ought to be the main object of modern literature, to describe the "whisper of the blood, and the pleading of the bone marrow". Hamsun pursued his literary program, debuting in 1890 with the psychological novel Hunger.Knut Hamsun was born as Knud Pedersen in Vågå, Gudbrandsdal, Norway.
He grew up in poverty in Hamarøy in Nordland. At 17, he became an apprentice to a ropemaker, and at about the same time he started to write. He spent several years in America, traveling and working at various jobs, and published his impressions under the title Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889).
In 1898, Hamsun married Bergljot Goepfert (née Bech), but the marriage ended in 1906. Hamsun then married Marie Andersen (b. 1881) in 1909 and she would be his companion until the end of his life
Marie was a young and promising actress when she met Hamsun, but she ended her career and traveled with him to Hamarøy. They bought a farm, the idea being "to earn their living as farmers, with his writing providing some additional income". However, after a few years, they decided to move south, to Larvik. In 1918, the couple bought Nørholm, an old and somewhat dilapidated manor house between Lillesand and Grimstad. Here Hamsun could occupy himself writing undisturbed, although he often travelled to write in other cities and places (preferably in spartan housing).
In 1898, Hamsun married Bergljot Goepfert (née Bech), but the marriage ended in 1906. Hamsun then married Marie Andersen (b. 1881) in 1909 and she would be his companion until the end of his life
Marie was a young and promising actress when she met Hamsun, but she ended her career and traveled with him to Hamarøy. They bought a farm, the idea being "to earn their living as farmers, with his writing providing some additional income". However, after a few years, they decided to move south, to Larvik. In 1918, the couple bought Nørholm, an old and somewhat dilapidated manor house between Lillesand and Grimstad. Here Hamsun could occupy himself writing undisturbed, although he often travelled to write in other cities and places (preferably in spartan housing).
Knut Hamsun died in his home at Nørholm, aged 92 in 1952.
Hamsun first received wide acclaim with his 1890 novel Hunger (Sult). The semi-autobiographical work described a young writer's descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty in the Norwegian capital of Kristiania.
Hamsun first received wide acclaim with his 1890 novel Hunger (Sult). The semi-autobiographical work described a young writer's descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty in the Norwegian capital of Kristiania.
The novel "Growth of the Soil" (Markens Grøde), secured Hamsun with the Nobel prize in litterature in 1920.
Never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one worthier of it," pronounced Thomas Mann of the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun. Andre Gide compared him to Dostoevsky but thought Hamsun was "perhaps even more subtle" than the Russian master. Maxim Gorky, writing privately in 1927, confessed to Hamsun: "I tell you this quite sincerely, at this moment you are the greatest artist in Europe; there is no one who can compare with you." Today Hamsun is little known or read in the English world and remains a deeply problematic presence in his homeland. Streets, parks, and monuments commemorate the names of Henrik Ibsen and Bjornstjerne Bjornson, but not of Hamsun. His name draws an ambiguous stare, a reaction that readers of his novels might be forgiven for thinking a more apt memorial than a conventional work of bronze or stone. What has happened? Knut Hamsun's rise to international renown in the first decades of the twentieth century was eclipsed by his fatal alliance with the Nazi cause in the final years of his long life, an act of misplaced nationalism rather than ideological affinity. Unrepentant until the end--he died at age ninety-two in 1952--Hamsun affected indifference, and throughout his later life was ambivalent about his celebrity. One even suspects that the scandalous acts of his late years--particularly the grotesque gesture of presenting his Nobel Prize medal to Joseph Goebbels--were calculated to shock, to undermine any facile conclusions of literary historians. Yet Hamsun's great novels remain potent and significant works of art. Ten years before Freud published An Interpretation of Dreams, Hamsun studied the shadowy impulses that inhabit the frontier between consciousness and unconsciousness. Hunger, Hamsun's first major novel, published in 1890, was a stark repudiation of the socially conscious, moralistic fiction exemplified by Ibsen. "I will make my character laugh where sensible people think he ought to cry," Hamsun exclaimed. "And why? Because my hero is no character, no 'type,' ... but a complex, modern being." Hamsun's novels are characterized by an almost subversive honesty, paradoxically realized through an awareness of the subtle dishonesties we practice through social conditioning and deference to convention. The most insignificant incident--sitting on a park bench with a stranger--can magnify for a Hamsun hero into a hypnotically revealing interior disquisition. Reading Hamsun's Mysteries, for example, Henry Miller commented, "I always feel I am reading another version of my own life."
The Hamsun centre (photo on top) has been built at Hamarø and shall be inaugurated on Hamsun's 150 year's anniversary on August 4, 2009.
- the masoria papers
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