August 4, 1859 - Knut Hamsun

A Nobel laureate whose literary influence stretched across nearly every major twentieth-century writer, Hamsun's place on this site rests not on his fiction but on his unwavering public support for Nazi Germany during its occupation of Norway — a collaboration that extended to writing a sympathetic obituary for Adolf Hitler in 1945. The collision between his towering artistic legacy and his political allegiances makes him one of the more studied cases of how ideology and genius can coexist without canceling each other out.

From Wikipedia

Knut Hamsun (; 4 August 1859 – 19 February 1952) was a Norwegian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun's work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to consciousness, subject, perspective and environment. He published more than 23 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, works of non-fiction and some essays.

Hamsun is considered "one of the most influential and innovative literary stylists of the past hundred years" (ca. 1890–1990). He pioneered psychological literature with techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, and influenced authors such as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Maxim Gorky, Stefan Zweig, Henry Miller, Hermann Hesse, John Fante, James Kelman, Charles Bukowski and Ernest Hemingway. Isaac Bashevis Singer called Hamsun "the father of the modern school of literature in his every aspect—his subjectiveness, his fragmentariness, his use of flashbacks, his lyricism. The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun". Since 1916, several of Hamsun's works have been adapted into motion pictures.

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