It has often been noted that
practically every one of Hamsun's heroes is of the same age as he was
then, and that their creator takes particular pain to accentuate this
fact. It is almost as if, during those days of feverish literary
struggle, he had risen to heights where he saw things so clearly that
no subsequent experience could add anything but occasional details.
Before he reached those heights, he had tried life as coal-heaver and
school teacher, as road-mender and surveyor's attendant, as farm hand
and streetcar conductor, as lecturer and free-lance journalist, as
tourist and emigrant. Twice he visited this country during the middle
eighties, working chiefly on the plains of North Dakota and in the
streets of Chicago. Twice during that time he returned to his own
country and passed through the experiences pictured in "Hunger," before,
at last, he found his own literary self and thus also a hearing from the
world at large. While here, he failed utterly to establish any
sympathetic contact between himself and the new world, and his first
book after his return in 1888 was a volume of studies named "The
Spiritual Life of Modern America," which a prominent Norwegian critic
once described as "a masterpiece of distorted criticism." But I own a
copy of this book, the fly-leaf of which bears the following inscription
in the author's autograph:
"A youthful work.
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