Just before and after the year 1900, fiction became a central arena for exploring identity, gender, and relationships.

For much of his life, Hamsun traveled and wandered a lot. In his teens, young Knut wandered to Lom, Bodø, Bø in Vesterålen, Kjerringøy and Tromsø, among other places. Later, he went to Kristiania, Copenhagen, Hardanger, twice to America in the 1880s, to Paris in the 1890s, to Finland and the Caucasus around the turn of the century, wandering around domestic hotels and boarding houses until the end of the 1930s. And then to forced stays in both old people's homes and psychiatric clinics.

Knut Hamsun was a political person throughout his adult life. He was interested and engaged in what was happening in society. He followed the major changes that characterized Norway during the period closely. Through various types of work, travel and socializing, through what he read and what he wrote, Hamsun came to leave his mark on his surroundings. But Hamsun was no politician. He did not participate in ordinary political work. He was poorly acquainted with the political decision-making processes, and his influence on them was small. More than helping to shape modern society, he contributed with a specific view of modern society.

It is no secret that authors' views on literary quality are often intimately connected to their own ambitions and literary program.

About the non-fiction writer Knut Hamsun

I saw the director twice, each time for perhaps fifteen minutes, he gave the impression of being straightforward and without conceit, it was possible to talk to him. He only made the unexpected mistake of sticking a report of my visit to Hitler in my nose, in which I was supposed to have made an anti-Semitic statement. To this day I have not read this report, let alone acknowledged it. Should I make a statement against the Jews? Moreover, I have had too many good friends among them and these friends have been good friends to me. I kindly urge the director to look through my entire production and see if he can find a statement against the Jews. (On Overgrown Paths, 1949)

Today, Hamsun's writing is often called modernist. But this designation is quite problematic, it is only partially correct. It is difficult to find arguments to claim that all of Hamsun's writing is modernist. Aesthetically, most of the novels he wrote in the 20th century represent realistic literature. However, there is little doubt that some of Hamsun's early works are groundbreaking modernist texts. This is especially true of Hunger and Mysteries, and to some extent also Pan and Victoria. Both thematically and narratively, these texts can be compared to the novels that are most often associated with the concept of modernism in literature, that is, the works of authors such as Joyce, Woolf, Kafka and Proust.

The piece of writing by Knut Hamsun that has provoked the most and at the same time been the most difficult to understand is the obituary of Adolf Hitler that the poet published in Aftenposten on May 7, 1945 – the day before Liberation Day. Here the German dictator is hailed as “a warrior for humanity and a preacher of the gospel of justice for all nations”, “a reformist figure of the highest rank”; but he had the misfortune of working “in a time of the most unprecedented brutality, which ultimately brought him down.” The final statement surpasses most in its blind loyalty: “This is how the ordinary Western European dares to look at Adolf Hitler. And we, his close followers, now bow our heads at his death.”

"I'm sitting here at home, that is, away, in my own way."

The importance of place for love in Pan and the Tramp

Knut Hamsun's three major novels from the early 1890s, Hunger, Mysteries and Pan, have, in addition to being considered the pinnacle of his writing, been seen as three positions in an exploration of the individual's position in the field of tension between culture and nature.

In 1917, Henrik Pontoppidan wrote an article about the relationship between Danish literature and the literature from neighboring countries Norway and Sweden.

Knut Hamsun was born as Knud Pedersen in Gudbrandsdalen on August 4, 1859. Three years later, the family moved to Hamarøy in Nordland. Hamarøy became Hamsun's childhood home. Here he grew up, and here his sense of home took root – a sense of patriotism in a small way.

Markens Grøde (1917), a novel about finding one's place, putting down roots and running a farm, was written while the author was on the move. The story of Sellanraa can be read as Hamsun's dream of the place he wanted for himself and his family, where he, as Isak, managed to combine the roles of father, husband, farmer and family provider.