Knut Hamsun: dreamer and dissenter

The Story

Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (1859û1952), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, was a man both brilliant and controversial. Lauded for his literary achievements by Hemingway, Gide, Hesse, and others, he also provoked outrage for his open collaboration with the Fascists during the German occupation of Norway and for his insistent refusal to renounce his Nazi sympathies. áThis gripping biography of Hamsun, now available for the first time in English, offers a nuanced account of this morally ambiguous man. Drawing on HamsunÆs extraordinary private archives and on his psychoanalystÆs notes, Ingar Sletten Kolloen delves deeply into HamsunÆs personal life and character. In vivid and telling detail, he describes HamsunÆs early years in a peasant farming family, his tempestuous and jealousy-racked second marriage, his erratic relationship with his children, and his infamous love affair with Nazi Germany, the roots of which Kolloen traces to HamsunÆs earliest days.á Much like the characters he created in novels such as Hunger, Growth of the Soil, Mysteries, and Pan, Hamsun was irrational, eccentric, strange, and compellingùa man uncomfortable in his own time.á