Knut Hamsun

Hamsun grew up poor in northern Norway, apprenticed to a shoemaker, and worked as a peddler, road laborer, and schoolteacher before crossing to America twice in the 1880s, taking jobs as a farmhand and Chicago streetcar conductor while failing to break through as a writer; he returned to Norway resentful and wrote a scathing book denouncing American culture. Hunger (1890), drawn from his own near-starvation wandering the streets of Kristiania, made him famous for its raw, unmediated rendering of a starving mind.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 for Growth of the Soil, by then Norway's most celebrated novelist. In old age he became an outspoken admirer of Hitler, met him personally, publicly supported Norway's Nazi collaborationist government, and even sent his Nobel medal to Goebbels; tried for treason after the war, he was spared prison only because he was declared to have permanently diminished mental faculties, and died disgraced and near-destitute in 1952.