SOURCE: Ferguson, Robert. “1888-1890: The Breakthrough: Hunger.” In Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, pp. 99-121. London: Hutchinson, 1987.

In the following essay, Ferguson creates an outline of events in Hamsun's life immediately preceding the publication of Hunger, including several anecdotes about Hamsun's relationships with other writers during this time.

The question of anonymity, and Hamsun's lifelong violent ambivalence towards the concept and consequences of personal fame, brings us at once up against one of the central paradoxes of this strange man. So far, we have met a Hamsun who was a tireless promoter of himself as personality and writer, keenly and noisily airing his views in newspaper debates, bringing himself through personal letters to the attention of editors and writers, famous and influential strangers. The Norwegian memoirist Peter Egge wrote that he first heard of him through a journalist colleague of his, Arne Dybfest, who told him that...