as on Hamsun.

Hearing of it, one might expect him to prove a man of the masses, full
of keen social consciousness. Instead, he must be classed as an
individualistic romanticist and a highly subjective aristocrat, whose
foremost passion in life is violent, defiant deviation from everything
average and ordinary. He fears and flouts the dominance of the many, and
his heroes, who are nothing but slightly varied images of himself, are
invariably marked by an originality of speech and action that brings
them close to, if not across, the borderline of the eccentric.

In all the literature known to me, there is no writer who appears more
ruthlessly and fearlessly himself, and the self thus presented to us is
as paradoxical and rebellious as it is poetic and picturesque. Such a
nature, one would think, must be the final blossoming of powerful
hereditary tendencies, converging silently through numerous generations
to its predestined climax. All we know is that Hamsun's forebears were
sturdy Norwegian peasant folk, said only to be differentiated from their
neighbours by certain artistic preoccupations that turned one or two of
them into skilled craftsmen. More certain it is that what may or may not
have been innate was favoured and fostered and exaggerated by physical
environment and early social experiences.

Hamsun was born on Aug. 4, 1860, in one of the sunny valleys of central
Norway. From there his parents moved when he was only four to settle in
the far northern district of Lofoden--that land of extremes, where the
year, and not the day, is evenly divided between darkness and light;
where winter is a long dreamless sleep, and summer a passionate dream
without sleep; where land and sea meet and intermingle so gigantically
that man is all but crushed between the two--or else raised to titanic