Hunger (Hamsun novel)

Hunger ( Norwegian: Sult ) is the first novel by Knut Hamsun. With him he made his literary breakthrough.

Formation

Hamsun began writing the novel in the summer of 1888 on the way back from his second visit to America. The Danish steamer Thingvalla moored on the route to Copenhagen a day in Kristiania. The city awakened in him unpleasant memories of the year 1886, when he was here unemployed endure a severe famine. Hamsun did not leave the ship and wrote at night the first lines of the novel, which already capture the oppressive atmosphere of the whole book:

In Copenhagen he rented an attic room and wrote again from hunger on. The unfinished manuscript he put Edvard Brandes ago, the literary editor of the newspaper Politiken. The deep fire taken persuaded Carl Behrens, to publish it anonymously in parts in November in the Danish magazine Ny jord (Eng. New Earth ). The work aroused at once because of the radicalism of his portrayal and the break with the fledgling concept of the new realism sensation. The Journal Dagblad aired soon the mystery surrounding the identity of the author. Hamsun continued to work on the plant, which then in 1890 appeared complete, but still anonymous. In the same year it was published by Samuel Fischer in German translation.

Hunger was included in the TIME library of 100 books.