After the failure of his literary ventures in the late 1870s, the school of life took the form of road construction work for a year and a half (1880-81).

Hamsun’s dream of becoming a writer had been conceived at an early age, amid circumstances that left him no choice but to fend for himself. If it can be said of any writer that he was self-made or self-taught, it can certainly be said of Hamsun. Not surprisingly, the two narratives published in his teens, Den Gådefulde (1877; The Enigmatic One) and Bjørger (1878), were clumsy and insignificant. The former is an idyllic tale in the manner of magazine fiction, in a language more Danish than Norwegian. The latter, a short novel, was modeled on Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s peasant tales of the 1850s. In 1879, with the support of a prosperous Nordland businessman, E. B. K. Zahl, Hamsun wrote another novel, “Frida,” which he presented to Frederik Hegel at Gyldendal Publishers in Copenhagen. It was turned down without comment. The manuscript of this story, which was also dismissed by Bjørnson (1832-1910), has been lost. Bjørnson suggested he become an actor. And so, in early 1880, in his twenty-first year, the first period of Hamsun’s literary apprenticeship came to an end.

During the 1880s hard physical labor went hand in hand with renewed literary and intellectual efforts. While employed in road construction, he had made his debut as a public lecturer. But though his lecture on August Strindberg was enthusiastically reviewed in the Gjøvik paper, Hamsun lost money on the venture.2 His next decision was not unusual for a poor, ambitious Norwegian in the 1880s: to emigrate to America. However, Hamsun was not primarily interested in improving his fortune; instead, he foresaw a future for himself as the poetic voice of the Norwegian community in the New World. Needless to say, the dream quickly foundered, though the lecturing activity was continued. To support himself he worked as a farmhand and store clerk, except for the last six months or so of the two-and-a-half-year stay, when he was offered the job of “secretary and assistant minister with a salary of $500 a year” by the head of the Norwegian Unitarian community in Minneapolis, Kristofer Janson (1841-1917).3 This was Hamsun’s first significant encounter with an intellectual milieu. While he did not share Janson’s religious beliefs, he clearly enjoyed browsing in his well-stocked library. But his stay was cut short: in the summer of 1884 his doctor diagnosed “galloping consumption,”4 and in the fall of that year Hamsun returned to Norway, apparently resigned to die. He was twenty-five years old. His illness turned out to be a severe case of bronchitis.

Back in Norway, Hamsun’s endeavors to support himself by writing stories, articles, and reviews for the newspapers, while working on a “big book,”5 brought only a meager harvest financially, despite a considerable amount of publishing activity. Worthy of mention is his article on Mark Twain in the weekly paper Ny illustreret Tidende (New Illustrated Gazette) in March 1885, important because, by a compositor’s error, the d in his name, Hamsund, was dropped. Henceforth, the young aspiring writer would use no other spelling of his name.

After a couple of years in Norway, at times in severe want, Hamsun returned to America, but now for purely economic reasons: to finance his literary ambition. From New York he wrote to a friend in Norway that it had become “impossible” for him at home.6 However, the challenges posed by America were still formidable. Only toward the end of his two-year stay, after supporting himself as a streetcar conductor in Chicago and a farm laborer in the Dakotas, was he able to turn his attention to literature. Having returned to Minneapolis in the fall of 1887, he delivered a series of lectures there during the winter of 1887-88. These lectures, which dealt with such literary figures as Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Bjørnson, Ibsen, and Strindberg, demonstrate Hamsun’s painfully acquired familiarity with the literary culture of his time. By July 1888 we find him in Copenhagen. In a brief sketch of his early life recorded in 1894 he says that, when the ship reached Kristiania, he “hid on board a day and a half,”7 bypassing the city that had so bitterly frustrated his literary dreams.