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Oh, what strange freaks one’s thoughts are guilty of when one is starving.
— Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Back in my misspent youth, I took a seminar on creative writing. One of the instructors gave the class a piece of advice which I never heeded. She said that if you want to be good enough at writing to make a living at it, don’t be good at anything else. Read more …
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, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. It painted Hamsun’s ideal of a solid, farm-based culture, where human values, instead of being fixed upon transitory artificialities which modern society had deemed fashionable, would be based upon the fixed wheel of the seasons in the safekeeping of an inviolable eternity where man and Nature existed in harmony: 
Remembering Knut Hamsun
(August 4, 1859–February 19, 1952)
Knut Hamsun was born Knut Pedersen in Lom, Norway on August 4, 1859. He died in Grimstad, Norway, on February 19, 1952. The author of more than twenty novels, plus poems, short stories, plays, and essays, Hamsun was one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers. His rejection of both Romanticism and naturalism, his emphasis on outsiders and rebels, and his exploration of inner and sometimes extreme states of consciousness, made him a pioneer of literary modernism. Read more …