Knut Hamsun

Hunger, in 1890, narrates a starving writer walking around Kristiania in a voice that abandoned realism entirely, and Kafka, Hemingway, Thomas Mann and Isaac Bashevis Singer all named it as a beginning. The Nobel came in 1920 for Growth of the Soil. Then Hamsun backed the German occupation of Norway, met the German leader in 1943 and spent the meeting complaining about the Reichskommissar, sent his Nobel medal to Goebbels, and published an admiring obituary for him in a Norwegian paper in May 1945. He was tried afterwards, held in a psychiatric clinic and fined into ruin, and Norway has been arguing about him ever since. The Cultural Life of Modern America is his hostile report on a country where he had worked as a labourer and a tram conductor.