Knut Hamsun is Norway's best-known novelist and one of the major world writers of modern times. He is commonly ranked immediately below the four great names of Scandinavian literature: Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg. His works are available in more than thirty languages, and he has won many admirers among European and American men of letters. Germany's Thomas Mann saw in Hamsun a direct descendant of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche; the Russians celebrated him for his dramatic works; Arthur Koestler praised his tender love stories; and H. G. Wells lauded his powerful prose epic, Markens grøde (1917; translated as Growth of the Soil, 1920), for which he won the Nobel Prize. Isaac Bashevis Singer spoke with admiration of Hamsun's modern subjectivism, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, and his lyricism, and he has been recognized as a precursor of European...