Knut Hamsun

Norwegian novelist, dramatist, poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.
Biography (mainly from wikipedia):
Knut Hamsun was born on august the 4th 1859 as Knud Pedersen in Lom in Gudbrandsdal. He was the fourth son of Peder Pedersen and Tora Olsdatter. He grew up in poverty in Hamarøy in Nordland. At seventeen, he became an apprentice to a ropemaker, and at about the same time he started to write. He spent several years in America, travelling and working at various jobs, and published his impressions under the title Fra det moderne Amerikas Aandsliv (1889). In 1898, Hamsun married Bergljot Goepfert, but the marriage ended in 1906. Hamsun then married Marie Andersen (born in 1881) in 1909 and she would be his companion until the end of his life. She wrote about their life together in her two memoirs. Marie was a young and promising actress when she met Hamsun, but she ended her career and travelled with him to Hamarøy. They bought a farm, the idea being "to earn their living as farmers, with his writing providing some additional income". However, after a few years, they decided to move south, to Larvik. In 1918, the couple bought Nørholm, an old and somewhat dilapidated manor house between Lillesand and Grimstad. The main residence was restored and redecorated. Here Hamsun could occupy himself writing undisturbed, although he often travelled to write in other cities and places (preferably in spartan housing). Knut Hamsun died on february the 19th 1952 in his home at Nørholm. He was 92 years old.
Hamsun first received wide acclaim with his 1890 novel Hunger (Sult). The semi-autobiographical work described a young and egocentric writer's descent into near madness as a result of hunger and poverty in the Norwegian capital of Kristiania (now Oslo). To many, the novel presaged the writings of Franz Kafka and other twentieth-century novelists with its internal monologue and bizarre logic. Other important works by Hamsun include Pan, Mysteries, and The Growth of the Soil (by which he received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1920). A fifteen-volume edition of his complete works was published in 1954.
Knut Hamsun's influence on european and american litterature in the 20th century cannot be overestimated. In 1929 Thomas Mann claimed that the Nobelprize in litterature never had been awarded to anyone deserving better, and writers like Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorkij, and André Gide have all expressed their Hamsun-admiration.
In a preface in an american edition of "Sult" (Hunger) Isac Bashevis Singer stresses that Hamsun "with his subjectivity, his impressionism, his use of the retrospective, his lyrics, are in every aspect the father of modern litterature." Singer means that the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.
Robert Ferguson which has written a biography about Hamsun have shomething of the same starting point. In "The Enigma of Knut Hamsun" (1988) he concludes that "craftsmanlike, he was one of the most influential and ingenious literary stylists in the past century. There is bearly a living writer in europe or america that are not, either consciously or uncosciously, indebted to him."
"Det er vanskelig å forstå seg rett på mennesker, hvem som er gal og hvem som er klok. Gud hjelpe oss alle for å bli gjennomskuet."