Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun, real name Knut Pedersen (1859-1952), Norwegian writer, whose work reflected his individualism and rejection of industrial civilization. Born in Lom on August 4, 1859, Hamsun, with no previous formal education, enrolled at the University of Christiania (now Oslo), planning to become a journalist. He soon gave up this attempt and emigrated to the United States where he worked at various occupations and wrote, chiefly in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In 1888 he returned finally to Norway and thereafter gave his full time to writing.

Hamsun was a leader of the Neo-Romantic revolt at the turn of the century and rose to the front rank of Scandinavian writers with the novel Hunger (1890; trans. 1899), a work dealing with the psychological effects of starvation. It was followed by a number of other novels, including Pan (1894; trans. 1920), Under the Autumn Star (1906; trans. 1922), embodying his ideas on the “unconscious life of the soul”, and A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings (1909; trans. 1922). In this period Hamsun's main characters were impulsive, irrational people; hating organized society, they generally escaped to remote places to avoid responsibility.

A group of later novels, such as Children of the Age (1913; trans. 1924) and Growth of the Soil (1917; trans. 1920) reveal Hamsun's concern with social problems. Growth of the Soil, considered Hamsun's greatest novel, deals with social issues, celebrating the ideal of the noble peasant and attacking capitalist decadence. He received the 1920 Nobel Prize for literature for this work. In his later novels, however, including Vagabonds (1927; trans. 1930), Hamsun returned to the depiction of the rootless, wandering individual of modern society.

Throughout his life Hamsun had strong antidemocratic views. In World War II he was the only leading Norwegian writer who publicly welcomed the German invasion of Norway in April 1940. In 1946 he was tried for collaboration but charges were dropped in view of his age. He died on February 19, 1952, at his home near Grimstad. His work had a wide influence throughout Europe on writers such as Thomas Mann, Maksim Gorky, and Isaac Bushevis Singer.