Selected Letters II, 1898-1952 Book

The night before he died, Hamsun's wife wrote to their daughter: "At this moment Hamsun is being played and read all over the world. They call him the greatest of living writers, and we do not even have the money to give him burial. And now he is lying in rags on his death bed". Norway's greatest writer after Ibsen, winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature, was an outcast when he died. The second volume of Hamsun's letters casts a revealing light on many fascinating aspects of Hamsun's private and public life.

They demonstrate the tireless and total dedication to his writing which earned him worldwide recognition, as well as the personal anguish and joy which two marriages and a divorce brought him. They often reveal the strange juxtaposition of the warmly sympathetic and the unexpectedly repellent sides of his personality. Finally, they show the painful price he paid for his support of the Nazis during World War II. After the war he was tried and found to have "impaired mental faculties". Rather than sentence him to prison, a massive fine was levied on him which made him destitute, and his wife and one of his sons were imprisoned for several years. Hamsun's final years left him alienated and alone among his fellow countrymen.