August.

HAMSUN, Knut.

$5,000.00

Item Number: 122385

New York: Coward-McCann, 1931.

First American edition and first in English, preceding the British edition by one year of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author in the year of publication on the front free endpaper, “B.A. Abel from yours respectfully Knut Hamsun 12/11.31.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Translated from the Norwegian by Eugene Gay-Tifft. Books inscribed by Hamsun are rare.

"Hemingway tried to write like him… Hesse called him, 'my favorite author'… and I.B. Singer stated that Hamsun was quite simply 'the father of the modern school of literature'" (Ferguson, 1). Awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hamsun was "the most subversive of modernists" (Gay, Modernism, 191). "Supremely gifted in the art of precise observation… [his] ironic scrutiny of society and its ways is both sustained and penetrating" (Naess, ed. History of Norwegian Literature, 184). August, Hamsun's "satiric fantasy of modernity gone awry," is at the heart of a monumental trilogy that includes his 1927 novel, Landstrykere (Vagabonds, 1930), and his 1933 novel, Men livet lever (Road Leads On, 1934) (Lyndstad, Knut Hamsun, 275). "In these three novels he develops in depth one of his most memorable characters: August… the embodiment of all that restlessness and rootlessness which for Hamsun seemed to epitomize the inauthentic spirit of the contemporary age" (Naess, 193-4). Yet Hamsun's role during the Nazi occupation of Norway, as well as his meetings with Hitler and Goebbels, made him one of literature's most controversial figures. "The extraordinary mix, in one man, of brilliant art and repugnant politics has produced a continuing fascination with Hamsun's life and writings" (Agar, Knut Hamsun, 3).