But it was this epic-scaled work that consolidated his candidacy for the Nobel Prize, which he was awarded in 1920.Ī young man’s book, an old man’s book the former an almost unremitting hallucination, the latter like something carved with patience into an obdurate oak. Growth of the Soil, by contrast, appeared when the author was nearing sixty, by that time revered across Europe and with many successes under his belt, including the novels Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and Victoria (1898).
Hunger, his first novel (he was thirty-one), captured the manic pitch of his long years of living on the brink, in his native Norway as well as in America, where he worked as a manual laborer, served as a streetcar conductor, and, as the well-known story goes, rode halfway across the country on top of a locomotive gulping air in an attempt to cure himself of what a doctor thought was TB (the diagnosis may have been spurious, or the stunt was just what was needed-the ailment disappeared). Twenty-seven years separate the publication of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, in 1890, and that of his mature masterwork, Growth of the Soil, in 1917.
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