Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 - February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian author. He was praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul. In 1920, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the epic, Growth of the Soil. He insisted that the main object of modern literature ought to be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow". Hamsun's literary debut was the 1890 ps...
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Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 - February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian author. He was praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul. In 1920, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for the epic, Growth of the Soil. He insisted that the main object of modern literature ought to be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow". Hamsun's literary debut was the 1890 psychological novel, Hunger, which some critics consider to have been an inspiration for Franz Kafka's classic short story, A Hunger Artist. Since 1945, Hamsun's international fame has derived almost entirely from his vehement advocacy of Nazi Germany both before World War II and after Germany occupied Norway in April, 1940. He lionized leading Nazis. In 1943, in the middle of the war, he mailed his Nobel medal to Joseph Goebbels and later visited Hitler. In a eulogy for the newly dead Hitler published May 7, 1945 — one day before surrender of...
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