Hamsun, Knut

The Norwegian author Knut Hamsun was born as Knut Pedersen at Lom in the Gudbrandsdalen valley, but from 1862 he was brought up in poverty on a farm, Hamsund, in Hamarøy, Nordland. He was put to work for his uncle at the age of nine and released at the age of fourteen when he embarked on an itinerant life as a stonemason, cobbler, road worker and primary school teacher. He lived for two periods in the United States in the 1880s where he earned a living as a tram driver in Chicago, returning to Norway in 1888. The same year he came into contact with the Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes in Copenhagen. Hamsun continued his nomadic lifestyle in Paris and elsewhere until he married his second wife, Marie, and settled in his native village. In 1917, he bought a farm, Nørholm, in Lillesand near Grimstad where he lived until his death in 1927.