Hunger

About this book

A young writer, nameless and starving, wanders the streets of Kristiania, today's Oslo, trying to sell articles to newspapers. Too proud to beg and too stubborn to give up, he pawns his waistcoat, chews wood shavings, tells absurd lies to strangers and swings between despair and wild exaltation, as hunger sharpens his mind into strange, feverish states. He tells it all in the first person, with a frankness never seen before.

Context and significance

Knut Hamsun (1859–1952) based the novel, published in 1890, on his own years of poverty, and it is often called the first modern psychological novel; Isaac Bashevis Singer said that the whole modern school of fiction stems from Hamsun. He won the Nobel Prize in 1920, but later disgraced himself by supporting the Nazi occupation of Norway. This is George Egerton's translation of 1899, in a slightly shortened later printing.

About the author