SOURCE: Coles, Robert. “Knut Hamsun: The Beginning and the End.” New Republic 157, no. 13 (23 September 1967): 21-4.

In the following essay, Coles summarizes the major action and themes in Hunger, concluding with a short history of Hamsun's literary career and political struggles.

On February 19, 1952 a man of 93 died near Grimstad, Norway. He was a writer, indeed one who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. He was also at the time of his death an officially recognized traitor, allowed by his nation to live out his last years at home only because of the “permanently impaired faculties” that advanced age was supposed to have caused. Now, fifteen years later, Knut Hamsun's first novel, Hunger, has been translated into English by the American poet Robert Bly; and at the same time we are offered a translation by Carl Anderson of the last writing Hamsun did, while a prisoner and forced...