Happy Birthday, Mr. Hamsun

From the always-interesting Writer's Almanac at Minnesota Public Radio:

It's the birthday of novelist Knut Hamsun, born Knut Pedersen in Lom, Norway (1859). Author of Hunger (1890) and Growth of the Soil (1917), he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. He said, "Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness. A word can be transformed into a color, light, a smell. It is the writer's task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored."

As I've said on countless occasions, Hunger has been my favorite novel for nearly twenty years now. I've recommended it to nearly everyone I know, and recently sent a spare copy to my niece Beth to try to indoctrinate the current generation of readers as well. Like many writers, Hamsun failed to maintain the effervesence of his earliest writings, and his novels become rather conventional as he got older. But, ironically, it was the plodding farming epic Growth of the Soil that won him the Nobel Prize.