Knut Hamsun

An absorbing biography of Nobel Prizewinning novelist Knut Hamsun, based on a wealth of previously unavailable sources Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (18591952), 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. This gripping biography of Hamsun, now available for the first time in English, offers a nuanced account of this morally ambiguous man. Drawing on Hamsuns extraordinary private archives and on his psychoanalysts notes, Ingar Sletten Kolloen delves deeply into Hamsuns personal life and character. In vivid and telling detail, he describes Hamsuns 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 Hamsuns earliest days. Much like the characters he created in novels such as Hunger, Growth of the Soil, Mysteries, and Pan, Hamsun was irrational, eccentric, strange, and compellinga man uncomfortable in his own time.