Hunger

xiii, 266 pp. Navy blue cloth, orange and green titles and decorations. Translated from the Norwegian by George Egerton, with an introduction by Edwin Bjorkman. Hamsun won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature for Growth of the Soil. This, his first major novel, did not appear in English until thirty years after its original publication in Norwegian. It and other works were likely translated and published in response to him receiving the prize. "Contemptuous of contemporary novels and what he saw as stereotypical plots and empty characters, in 1890 Knut Hamsun wrote "Hunger", which is a searing excursion into the realm of the irrational. In a moment-by-moment internal monologue, Hamsun reveals the profound anguish of a struggling writer facing the possibility of death in a world indifferent to his existence." "Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 – February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian author. He was praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul. In 1920, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the epic, Growth of the Soil. He insisted that the main object of modern literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow". Hamsun's literary debut was the 1890 psychological novel, Hunger, which some critics consider to have been an inspiration for Franz Kafka's classic short story, A Hunger Artist."