Knut Gamsun

Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian writer. He was born on 4 August 1859 in the parish of Vågå in the Gudbrandsdalen valley. He was the fourth child in the family of the village tailor Peder Pedersen. He lived in poverty and, from the age of nine, worked in his uncle’s office; then came years of wandering (from 1873), during which he changed many occupations. He began writing at the age of 17. His first book appeared in 1877. In his youth he traveled extensively, including to the United States. After 1888 he settled in Copenhagen. In 1890 Hamsun published the innovative psychological novel *Hunger*, which brought him fame. In the 1890s and especially in the 1900s, Hamsun was one of the world’s most popular writers and dramatists of modernism, was translated repeatedly, and was very well known in Russia. In 1898 Hamsun married Bergljot Bech — this marriage lasted eight years. In 1909 he married for the second time (to the actress Marie Andersen). Their son was Tore Hamsun. After the wedding, Marie left her career and remained with Hamsun until the end of his life. In 1918 the couple bought the Nørholm estate, where Hamsun would spend the rest of his life. In 1920 Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the monumental work *Growth of the Soil*. In 1943 Hamsun gave his Nobel medal to the Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels. After Hitler came to power in Germany and during World War II, Hamsun, who had previously systematically championed German culture and spoken out against Anglo-Saxon culture, sided with the Nazis and supported Vidkun Quisling. Seeing all the atrocities and crimes of the regime under Reich Commissioner Terboven, Hamsun, after meeting Hitler in 1943, demanded that he free Norway from Terboven and grant it real political independence, which enraged the Führer. After the end of the war Hamsun was brought to trial. He avoided imprisonment because of his advanced age, but was fined in a civil suit. Later he described the trial in the book *On Overgrown Paths*. The writer’s son Arild served as a war correspondent