| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9781605979229 | | Publisher: Book Jungle | | Publish Date: 9/16/2008 | | Buy.com Sku: 209330874 | | Item#: | | Dimensions (in Inches) 9.25H x 7.5L x 1T | | Pages: 364 |
|
|
|
| | | Those readers are, perhaps, most fortunate who come upon such a book as this without foretaste or preparation. To the mind under spell of an asthetic or emotional appeal, the steps that went to make it, the stages whereby the author passed, are as irrelevant as the logarithms that went to build an aeroplane. Yet it is only by knowledge of such steps that the achievement can be fully understood. The story is epic in its magnitude, in its calm, steady progress and unhurrying rhythm, in its vast and intimate humanity. The author looks upon his characters with a great, all-tolerant sympathy, aloof yet kindly, as a god. - W.W. Worster
| Author Bio| Knut Hamsun | | Born Knut Pederson, Hamsun grew up 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle and virtually no formal education, spending his youth working for a relative to whom his family was in debt. However, his first work of fiction, "Den Gaadefulde", appeared in 1877, when he was only 18. After its publication, he taught school, and continued to write. In 1878 he moved to Christiania (now Oslo), living in poverty, his career going nowhere. He spent the years from 1882 to 1884, and again from 1886 to 1888, in the United States, working his way across the country at odd jobs. In 1890, back in Oslo, Hamsun finally had a sensational literary success: "Sult" ("The Hunger"), the story of a starving young writer, became an overnight success and established Hamsun as an important writer. In 1917, after the publication of "Markens Grode" ("The Growth of the Soil"), he was able to buy a vast estate in southern Norway, where he devoted himself to writing and farming. In addition to fiction, Hamsun wrote travel books, essays, short stories and plays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Though he never joined the party, Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer during the occupation of Norway in World War II and wrote series of pro-Fascist articles, as a result of which he was arrested after the war. He spent some time in a psychiatric clinic in Oslo, and in 1947 he was tried and fined for his opinions; his personal account of these experiences appeared in "Pa Gjengrodde Stier" ("On Overgrown Paths"), published when he was 90 years old. He lived to be 92. |
| |
|
|
__USERID__
/prod/growth-of-the-soil/q/loc/106/209330874.html
|
