could only emanate from a star of the first magnitude.

Sudden as was Hamsun's recognition, however, it has proved lasting. The
story of his rise from obscurity to fame is one of absorbing interest.
Behind that hour of triumph lay a long and bitter struggle, weary years of
striving, of constant and courageous battle with a destiny that strewed
his path with disappointments and defeats, overwhelming him with
adversities that would have swamped a genius of less energy and real
power.

Knut Hamsun began life in one of the deep Norwegian valleys familiar to
English readers through Bjornson's earlier stories. He was born in August,
1860. When he was four years old his poverty-stricken parents sent him to
an uncle, a stern, unlovely man who made his home on one of the Lofoten
Islands--that "Drama in Granite" which Norway's rugged coast-line flings
far into the Arctic night. Here he grew up, a taciturn, peculiar lad,
inured to hardship and danger, in close communion with nature; dreaming
through the endless northern twilight, revelling through the brief intense
summer, surrounded by influences and by an atmosphere which later were to
give to his production its strange, mystical colouring, its
pendulum-swings from extreme to extreme.

At seventeen he was apprenticed to a cobbler, and while working at his
trade he wrote and, at the cost of no one knows what sacrifices, saved
enough money to have his first literary efforts printed and published.
They consisted of a long, fantastic poem and a novel, "Bjorger"--the
latter a grotesque conglomeration of intense self-analytical studies.
These attracted far less attention than they really deserved. However, the
cobbler's bench saw no more of Knut Hamsun.