It has ceased to represent my opinion of America.
May 28, 1903. Knut Hamsun."
In its original form, "Hunger" was merely a sketch, and as such it
appeared in 1888 in a Danish literary periodical, "New Earth." It
attracted immediate widespread attention to the author, both on account
of its unusual theme and striking form. It was a new kind of realism
that had nothing to do with photographic reproduction of details. It was
a professedly psychological study that had about as much in common with
the old-fashioned conceptions of man's mental activities as the
delirious utterances of a fever patient. It was life, but presented in
the Impressionistic temper of a Gauguin or Cezanne. On the appearance of
the completed novel in 1890, Hamsun was greeted as one of the chief
heralds of the neo-romantlc movement then spreading rapidly through the
Scandinavian north and finding typical expressions not only in the works
of theretofore unknown writers, but in the changed moods of masters like
Ibsen and Bjornson and Strindberg.
It was followed two years later by "Mysteries," which pretends to be a
novel, but which may be better described as a delightfully irresponsible
and defiantly subjective roaming through any highway or byway of life or
letters that happened to take the author's fancy at the moment of
writing. Some one has said of that book that in its abrupt swingings
from laughter to tears, from irreverence to awe, from the ridiculous to
the sublime, one finds the spirits of Dostoyevski and Mark Twain
blended.
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