Rare First Edition in English
HAMSUN, Knut. Growth Of The Soil. London: Glydendal1920
8vo. Original green cloth with black title lettering; pp. [6]; 406; Offsetting to free endpapers; foreedges faded; minimal rubbing to top and bottom of spine; partial ink stamp to rear free endpaper; otherwise very good.
First edition in English of one of Knut Hamsun's first works to be translated into English and published the same year that he won the Nobel Prize.
H.G. Wells- "one of the very greatest novels I have ever read."
The Growth of the Soil is the novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun that would win him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. It was the Nobel Committee that would describe the Growth of the Soil as such; "a classic, but in a deeper and more profound sense than usual… Hamsun has given to our times a classic that can be measured against the best we already have."
Often using literary techniques such as stream of conciousness, unusual at the time, the novel concerns the story of a man who settles in rural Norway. Hamsun expresses his disliking for modernity through portraying the relationship between the protagonist and his natural environment, which is to his characters both an intrigue and a hindrance. Many classify Hamsun as being one of the first to pioneer the psychological novel. Knut was of the belief that the main objective of Modernist literature should be to initiate the, "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow" and he was of great inspiration to novelists such as Franz Kafka.
During the outbreak of WWII, Hamsun's reputation was severely tainted by his Nazi associations when he embraced the German occupation of Norway, going so far as to gift his Nobel Prize in Literature to the Nazi propaganda minister, Goebbels. He was convicted of Treason in 1945 but evaded imprisonment due to old age.
Walter Gibbs, writing for The New York Times in 2009, would summarise, "We can’t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years … That’s our Hamsun trauma. He’s a ghost that won’t stay in the grave".
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