Birthday of Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun was born as Knud Pedersen. His first book appeared in 1877 and he was noticed but only after he had lived in the USA (1882 – 1884, 1886 – 1886) and had settled in Copenhagen. His novel “Hunger” was published in 1890 and made a sensation with principal and new interpretation of the theme. Hamsun didn’t blame society: as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Johan August Strindberg he represented feelingly and aestheticized irrational acts in human brain. “Pan”, “Under the Autumn Star”, “A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings”, “The Last Joy” are his other works of this period. His Neo-Romantic revolt against civilization resulted in his “return to nature” ideologically. In 1911, after the period of wandering, Hamsun chose the life of a gentleman-farmer and created his best novel “Growth of the soil” (1917), the epos of the simple life, which brought him the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature and the international recognition in the turbulent years after the World War I.