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The Life of Knut Hamsun

(1859-1952)

            Knut Hamsun was an influential Norwegian novelist whose reputation has yet to fully recover after his support of the Nazi Party during World War II. Like his contemporary, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Hamsun became one of Norway's most acclaimed writers, and in 1920, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature following the publication of the novel many consider his masterpiece, GROWTH OF THE SOIL (1917). His admiration for Germany blinded him from truly observing the horrors of Hitler's reign, and this one political misstep was to be his undoing. Though he never did any prison time, Hamsun spent the last years of his life in poverty and obscurity. Today the majority of the literary world has forgot him, and the Norwegian government still regards him as an artistic embarrassment to this day. His novel, HUNGER (1890), is all that has retained its original enthusiasm with the reading audience of today that it had back when it was released.

            Knut Pedersen was born in Lom, Norway, on August 4, 1859. He was the fourth child of a poor tailor by the name Peder Pedersen and his wife, Tora Olsdatter Garmotraedat. As a child, Knut was isolated from other boys his age and forced to work under his uncle, a man named Hans Olsen to whom the family was indebted. Knut came to loathe this pompous man who was forcing him to spend his youth constantly at work and without friends, and it was because of Olsen that he was to later run away from home. Until his eventual flight from the homestead, however, Knut merely had to cope. He read books to get past the loneliness and resentment that characterized his youth, and they were his sole salvation in a harsh and unforgiving youth. In 1873, young Knut could no longer take the constant pressure of his home life, so he ran away from home and began to wander Norway, making occasional trips to the United States.

            Knut wrote his first novel entitled THE ENIGMATIC ONE (1877) at the age of seventeen in between the various jobs he took to support himself. The work was published under the pseudonym Knut Pedersen Hamsund when he turned eighteen, and the year after he published another novel entitled BJØRGER (1878). These early novels are the typically flawed works of a young writer without any definite style except that which he has read. His first foray into the world of poetry, entitled "The Reconciliation," failed to attract any attention, so Knut turned his attention back to writing novels. In 1879, with the help of a rich merchant named Erasmus Zahl, Knut was able to complete his third novel FRIDA without financial obligations delaying him. No one wanted to publish the novel that the young writer had worked so hard on, however, and Knut was dejected from his original aspiration to be a writer of worth for a time.  At this point, he was publishing novels under the assumed name Knut Hamsun after a printing error that had erased the "d" on the tail end of his false name. He dropped the Pedersen after realizing it made his identity a little too obvious, and it was under the new name of Knut Hamsun that he was to publish FRIDA. With failure having marred his early literary pursuits, Hamsun spent the next years traveling Norway and the United States, taking odd jobs here and there and producing little creative work.

            After spending over four years in America, Hamsun wrote a satire on American spirituality entitled THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF MODERN AMERICA (1889). The work gained little to no attention, and Hamsun, in turn, left America for Norway. After a year of writing, Hamsun finally had his first success with HUNGER in 1890. The novel depicts a young writer who wanders aimlessly through the city of Christiania without any food or shelter. When published, HUNGER became an immediate success in Norway, and soon it was being published in Germany, Russia, and America. Encouraged by this success, Hamsun began devoting more time to writing. In 1892, he published MYSTERIES, the story Johan Nilsen Nagel, a mystery man and Ubermensch who suddenly arrives in a small Norwegian town and proceeds to leave his mark before vanishing as quickly as he came. In this novel, as in HUNGER, Hamsun breaks beyond the Victorian mold that so many novels had been cast in during the nineteenth century, and experiments with new forms of prose writing that foreshadow the existential movement started by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus years later in France.

            PAN (1894) was published two years after the critical success of MYSTERIES and proved to be equally successful with the book reviewers of Norway. PAN is the story of Lieutenant Thomas Glahn and his time spent in isolation out in the woods of Norway. Following this third success, Hamsun decided to take a break from writing fiction and pursue a career as a playwright. Hamsun proceeded to write a number of plays, including AT THE GATES OF THE KINGDOM (1895), GAME OF LIFE (1896), and EVENING GLOW (1897), but none of these works were to achieve the success of his novels. Deterred and resentful of successful playwrights before him, Hamsun made it no secret that he did not regard the play as a serious art form, and that he did not hold his fellow countryman and playwright Ibsen in high regards. Hamsun returned to the familiar medium of novel with an experiment of sorts entitled VICTORIA in 1898. The novel was an exception to Hamsun's earlier work in that it was much less intense in comparison with HUNGER, MYSTERIES, and PAN. This did not stop the novel from receiving good reviews from Norwegian literary critics, and with this success Hamsun charmed a young woman named Bergljot Gopfertin into marriage that same year.

            Deciding to return to writing plays, Hamsun entered the twentieth century with FRIAR VENDT (1902), which did no better than his earlier plays. In between this first foray in writing plays in the twentieth century and a second entitled QUEEN TAMARA in 1903, Hamsun did not concern himself with fiction. This understandably had bad effects on himself and the marriage, which turned bitter early on despite the birth of a daughter named Victoria (in honor of Hamsun's fourth successful book) in 1902. After swearing off plays for a little while, Hamsun wrote two short story collections entitled BRUSHWOOD (1903) and STRIVING LIFE (1905) as well as a novella titled DREAMERS (1904) and a novel, UNDER THE AUTUMN STAR (1906) before divorcing his wife Bergljot in 1906. Their problems had been numerous and included Hamsun's tendency to drink heavily and spend long hours out with his friends instead of at home with his wife and daughter. Now having avowed to steer clear of both marriage and writing plays, the forty-eight-year-old author probably knew it wouldn’t be long before he once again tried one and then the other. After another novel entitled BENONI (1908), Hamsun affixed himself to another fictional venture, but was not able to stave off marriage any longer. In 1909, he was married to a young actress by the name of Marie Andersen. Lucky for Hamsun, this union would last for the rest of his life.

            The same year as his second and final marriage, Hamsun completed two novels,  ROSA and A WANDERER PLAYS ON MUTED STRINGS. The following year brought forth Hamsun's last attempt at writing a play, IN THE GRIP OF LIFE (1910). Until the publication of THE GROWTH OF THE SOIL in 1917, Hamsun focused entirely on fiction and completed three novels, THE LAST JOY (1912), CHILDREN OF THE AGE (1913), and SEGELFOSS TOWN (1915). None of these books proved to be as successful as HUNGER or any of Hamsun's earlier novels. The novel that would win Hamsun the Nobel Prize in Literature, THE GROWTH OF THE SOIL, appeared in 1917.  Growth is the story of Isak, a young man who immerses himself in nature. GROWTH OF THE SOIL would be both critically acclaimed and financially successful, and would begin the golden age of Hamsun's literary career.

            In 1920, Knut Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil," at the age of sixty-one. He accepted the accolade with graciousness and with much pride at this important acknowledgment of his literary talents. Following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize, Hamsun began to focus his writing around an adventurous wanderer by the name of August in the Vagabond Trilogy, which consists of WAYFARERS (1927), AUGUST (1930), and THE ROAD LEADS ON (1933). In 1936 would come Hamsun's last novel, THE RING IS CLOSED. At this point in his life, the aging author had become preoccupied with observing the dictatorship of Adolph Hitler, who came to control Germany in 1933. He would support the Nazi Party even when it invaded Norway in 1940. When he had the chance to meet Hitler in 1943, Hamsun jumped at the chance, and even presented Joseph Goebbels, the infamous Nazi propagandist, with his Nobel Prize medal as a gesture that symbolized his approval of the portrait that Goebbels had painted of Hitler in the German media. The end of a long and illustrious literary career also accompanied Hamsun's handing over of his Noble Prize to Goebbels.

            After the war ended and Hitler, along with a long list of Nazi Party members that included Goebbels, had committed suicide, Hamsun was left without esteem, nor respect. In 1948, the Norwegian forced Hamsun to pay a fine and undergo mental examination for his public support of the Nazi Party. Instead of playing senile, the author in his late eighties protested his mental stability with ON OVERGROWN PATHS (1949), a book of memoirs published when the author had just turned ninety. The book sold well, but Hamsun's reputation never would recover his support of the Nazis. On February 19, 1952, Knut Hamsun passed away in relative anonymity that would enshroud his career for many years. Even today his reputation has yet to be repaired to it's original respectability before the Second World War, and yet Hamsun's novels, especially HUNGER, are to this day regarded as classics and purveyors of the existentialist movement.

The Works of Knut Hamsun