Knut Hamsun
From Philosopedia
Hamsun, Knut (4 August 1859 - 19 February 1952)
Knut Pedersen, Norway’s novelist best known by his chosen name of Hamsun, was born in Lom, Gudbrandsdal, Norway, to Peder Pedersen and Tora Olsdatter (Garmostrædet). He started writing when a teenager, spent several years in America, and published his impressions as Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889).
Hamsun was an admirer of Scandinavian rationalists Henrik Ibsen, Björnstjerne Björnson, and Georg Brandes. He worked in America as a tram-driver and barber before returning to Norway to become its leading writer. Although broadly classed as a pantheist, he held “no particular philosophy,” stated biographer C. D. Marcus.
He wrote Hunger (1890). In a style now called literary naturalism, the work was greeted as one of the first “modern” novels, one that used a reflective, inner voice long before Proust or Joyce. The work was so influential that Isaac B. Singer in Knut Hamsun, Artist of Skepticism stated that “the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.”
He also wrote Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and The Growth of the Soil (1917). The latter work set simple agrarian values against those of the new industrial society and was awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Although Norwegians are somewhat and deservedly proud of him, they have written widely about being ill at ease concerning his flagrant Nazi sympathies. During World War II Hamsun supported the collaborationist government of Norway’s pro-German and fascist leader Vidkund Quisling. He had welcomed the brutal German occupation of Norway during World War II. At one point. he had flown to meet Hitler at Hitler's mountain lair in Bavaria.
In 1920 Hamsun sent his Nobel medal to German propagandist Herman Goering, and upon Hitler’s death he openly mourned. In 1946 Hamsun was declared by psychiatrists to be permanently mentally disabled and was fined $80,000 for economic collaboration with the enemy. Similarly, Ezra Pound made a controversial insanity plea to avoid being being tried as a traitor and, if found guilty, killed.
In recent years Hamsun’s reputation has improved. Admittedly a cynic who despised suffragettes and shared August Strindberg’s misogynist views, Hamsun had an intense love of nature, an interest in the unconscious, and a humanistic concern for the material condition of the individual and its effect on one’s spirit.
Biographer Robert Ferguson in Enigma: the Life of Knut Hamsun (1988) describes him as having been a man of generosity and integrity. He was, say his defenders, very old and perhaps senile when he fell in with Norway’s Nazis. One of his literary admirers is America’s writer in Yiddish Bashevis Singer.
Norwegian Humanist Levi Fragell, however, thinks Hamsun “did not criticize religion and, at the end of his life, expressed pro-Christian views.”
In 2009, Hamsun's publisher, Gyldendal, put out a new Collected Works in Norwegian - its 27 volumes contain more than 30 novels as well as essays and travelogues.
{CE; The Economist, 17 January 1998; Walter Gibbs, "Norwegian Nobel Laureate, Once Shunned, Is Now Celebrated; OEL; RE}
