through
trades and continents which lasted until his first real artistic
achievement with "Hunger," In 1888-90. It has often been noted that
practically every one of Hamsun's heroes is of the same age as he was
then, and that their creator takes particular pain to accentuate this
fact. It is almost as if, during those days of feverish literary
struggle, he had risen to heights where he saw things so clearly that
no subsequent experience could add anything but occasional details.

Before he reached those heights, he had tried life as coal-heaver and
school teacher, as road-mender and surveyor's attendant, as farm hand
and streetcar conductor, as lecturer and free-lance journalist, as
tourist and emigrant. Twice he visited this country during the middle
eighties, working chiefly on the plains of North Dakota and in the
streets of Chicago. Twice during that time he returned to his own
country and passed through the experiences pictured in "Hunger," before,
at last, he found his own literary self and thus also a hearing from the
world at large. While here, he failed utterly to establish any
sympathetic contact between himself and the new world, and his first
book after his return in 1888 was a volume of studies named "The
Spiritual Life of Modern America," which a prominent Norwegian critic
once described as "a masterpiece of distorted criticism." But I own a
copy of this book, the fly-leaf of which bears the following inscription
in the author's autograph:

"A youthful work. It has ceased to represent my opinion of America.
May 28, 1903. Knut Hamsun."

In its original form, "Hunger" was merely a sketch, and as such it
appeared in 1888 in a Danish literary periodical, "New Earth." It
attracted immediate widespread attention to the author, both on account
of its unusual theme and striking form. It was a new kind of realism
that had nothing to do with photographic reproduction of details. It was
a professedly psychological study that had about as much in common with
the old-fashioned conceptions of man's mental activities as the
delirious utterances of a fever patient. It was life, but presented in
the Impressionistic temper of a Gauguin or Cezanne. On the appearance of
the completed novel in 1890, Hamsun was greeted as one of the chief
heralds of the neo-romantic movement then spreading rapidly through the
Scandinavian north and finding typica