Hamsun's Controversy

Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize in 1920 for novels like Hunger, which pioneered stream of consciousness before Joyce. His prose influenced Hemingway, Kafka, and Henry Miller.

He also supported the Nazi occupation of Norway, met Hitler in person, and gave his Nobel medal to Goebbels. After the war he was tried and fined. Norwegian literature has never fully resolved its relationship with its greatest prose stylist, who was also a collaborator with fascism, and Hamsun forces the question every literature must face: what do you do when your most gifted writer proves morally reprehensible?