Norse of Nature
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. 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