The novels "Editor Lynge" and "New Earth," both published in 1893, were
social studies of Christiania's Bohemia and chiefly characterized by
their violent attacks on the men and women exercising the profession
which Hamsun had just made his own. Then came "Pan" in 1894, and the
real Hamsun, the Hamsun who ever since has moved logically and with
increasing authority to "The Growth of the Soil," stood finally
revealed. It is a novel of the Northland, almost without a plot, and
having its chief interest in a primitively spontaneous man's reactions
to a nature so overwhelming that it makes mere purposeless existence
seem a sufficient end in itself. One may well question whether Hamsun
has ever surpassed the purely lyrical mood of that book, into which he
poured the ecstatic dreams of the little boy from the south as, for the
first time, he saw the forestclad northern mountains bathing their feet
in the ocean and their crowns in the light of a never-setting sun. It is
a wonderful paean to untamed nature and to the forces let loose by it
within the soul of man.
Like most of the great writers over there, Hamsun has not confined
himself to one poetic mood or form, but has tried all of them. From the
line of novels culminating in "Pan," he turned suddenly to the drama,
and in 1895 appeared his first play, "At the Gates of the Kingdom." It
was the opening drama of a trilogy and was followed by "The Game of
Life" in 1896 and "Sunset Glow" in 1898.
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