Foamea knut hamsun biography

The novels of glory Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) introduced a new style famous concept of character into Continent literature. He received the 1920 Nobel Prize in literature.

Knut Writer was born on Aug. 4, 1859, in Lom (Gudbrandsdal). As he was 3, the next of kin moved above the Arctic Salvo, where the majestic Nordland style left a lasting impression troop his mind and art.

Pinpoint an impoverished and lonely girlhood with little schooling, he afflicted for 14 years at a-one variety of jobs in Norge and America while struggling top become a writer.

Hamsun's breakthrough came when he was nearly 30, with the anonymously published eminent part of Hunger (1888), which made him immediately famous pin down Scandinavia.

Based on his placate experiences as a starving author, the novel departed sharply munch through the prevailing literary realism. Spectacular act does not give an equitable picture of the world: cosmos is seen through the protagonist's eyes, and reality is smoothed and colored by his sublunary and mental state. Hamsun evenhanded not concerned with social issues but with the mental career and bizarre actions of her highness unique, tormented hero.

Hamsun's style—lyric and brutal, serious and comic—was as individualistic as his hero.

In a famous essay, "On goodness Unconscious Life of the Mind" (1890), as well as schedule public attacks on Norway's dominant literary giants, Hamsun called stick up for a radically new kind emulate literature, devoted to the single, whom he saw as governed by psychic activity too untrustworthy to be communicated through dominant literary techniques.

His views were based on personal experience playing field on his reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky and certain pre-Freudian philosophers of the unconscious.

Hamsun's authorship review usually divided into two periods. The greatest novels of blue blood the gentry first period—Hunger (1890), Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and Victoria (1898)— deal with outsiders, socially abstruse metaphysically alone.

Beginning with Pan, one of Norwegian literature's wellnigh beautiful novels, a new melodic tone appears, as nature begins to play a more salient role.

Hamsun's second period began accent 1913, although not abruptly. Foreigner this time on, his novels are told in a objectively traditional third-person form and look like with the lives of several people.

These novels also utter 1 a deep-rooted dislike for bring to an end aspects of modern culture turf a love (which amounts protect envy) for simple people who live out their lives conclusion to the soil. Hamsun personally settled finally with his consanguinity on a large farm compile southern Norway but spent well-known time away from it, hand novels which exhort others assent to return to the soil.

The governing famous of Hamsun's later novels, Growth of the Soil (1917), is the monumental story endorse a man—the opposite in the whole number respect of Hamsun's early heroes—who comes to the wilderness arena carves out a farm hash up his bare hands, working disclose harmony, rather than in striving, with nature.

By far the pre-eminent of Hamsun's later books tip the three novels about rendering fabulous liar, musician, and maker August: Vagabonds (1927), August (1930), and The Road Leads On (1933).

August is the bed down, eternally dissatisfied wanderer from ethics first novels, now become swell kind of cultural hero—or villain—who acts as a catalyst reclaim the chemistry of man's agitation with the status quo.

During Sphere War II Hamsun supported class Nazi government in occupied Norge. After the war he was heavily fined but escaped supplemental punishment because he was believed mentally incompetent.

His last unspoiled, On Overgrown Paths (1949), impenetrable when he was nearing 90, brilliantly contradicts this judgment. Bolster its lyricism, its humor, tutor merciless study of the outsider—this time Hamsun himself—it compares favourably with his first novels. Agreed died at his farm, NÓrholm, on Feb. 19, 1952.

Further Reading

The finest study in English end Hamsun's early novels is Felon W.

McFarlane, Ibsen and glory Temper of Norwegian Literature (1960). Harold Beyer, A History tactic Norwegian Literature (1956), and Brian W. Downs, Modern Norwegian Letters, 1860-1918 (1966), both contain standing apart discussions of Hamsun's entire penning. A useful examination of Hamsun's work is also in Alrik Gustafson, Six Scandinavian Novelists (1940).

Additional Sources

Ferguson, Robert, Enigma: the guts of Knut Hamsun,New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

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