"Hunger" by Knut Hamsun is a novel written in the late 19th century. It is a stark, psychologically intimate portrait of a destitute young writer wandering Christiania, tracing his pride, imagination, and desperation as hunger frays his mind. The focus is less on plot than on a vivid inner life—restless thoughts, sudden exaltations, and humiliations—rendered in intense, impressionistic prose. The opening of the novel follows an unnamed aspiring writer as he wakes
in a bare attic, broke and hungry, and drifts through Christiania trying to write, find work, and keep his dignity. He pawns his waistcoat to give a coin to a lame stranger, buys a meager meal, and oscillates between grand ideas (new essays and “philosophical” treatises) and erratic impulses (taunting a woman he dubs Ylajali, spinning lies for a credulous old man). He submits a literary sketch to a newspaper and clings to hope while dodging his landlady, then abandons his room and spends a cold, miserable night in the woods. Hunger sharpens and distorts his perceptions; small slights enrage him, and brief bursts of inspiration give way to emptiness. By the end of this opening, rebuffed for a bookkeeping job over a foolish date error, he is weakened and ashamed, yet still forcing a polite front as he tries to seize any chance—such as an advertised job helping an invalid—that might keep him going. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
This is an uncensored version of George Egerton's 1899 translation of Hamsun's "Sult". Three pages' worth of text were removed before the sixth American printing by A.A. Knopf in 1921. For a censored version, see #8387.
Carla Foust, Emmanuel Ackerman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
