I know of nobody, Herr Reichsminister, who has unstintingly, year after year, written and spoken on Europe’s and humanity’s behalf as idealistically as yourself.” Twenty-three years after receiving the Nobel, Hamsun made a gift of his medal to Joseph Goebbels, explaining, “Nobel established his prize for the previous year’s most ‘idealistic’ writing. Summing up the modernist literary consensus, Thomas Mann issued a characteristically lapidary pronouncement: “Never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one worthier of it.” To Henry Miller, Hamsun was “the Dickens of my generation.” Hamsun received the world’s greatest literary honor in 1920. “The whole modern school of fiction in the 20th century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the 19th century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat,’ ” declared Isaac Bashevis Singer. Knut Hamsun may lack name recognition in the English-speaking world, but the admiration of his contemporaries suggests the stature he once enjoyed.
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