Edvard Grieg
Edvard Munch
Roald Amundsen
Fridtjof Nansen
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Knut Hamsun
Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, was a man both brilliant and
controversial. Lauded for his literary achievements by Hemingway, Gide, Hesse, and others, he also provoked outrage for
his open collaboration with the Fascists during the German occupation of Norway and for his insistent refusal to renounce his Nazi sympathies.
This gripping biography of Hamsun, now available for the first time in English, offers a nuanced account of this morally ambiguous man.
Drawing on Hamsun’s extraordinary private archives and on his psychoanalyst’s notes, Ingar Sletten Kolloen delves deeply into Hamsun’s
personal life and character. In vivid and telling detail, he describes Hamsun’s early years in a peasant farming family, his tempestuous
and jealousy-racked second marriage, his erratic relationship with his children, and his infamous love affair with Nazi Germany,
the roots of which Kolloen traces to Hamsun’s earliest days. Much like the characters he created in novels such as Hunger, Growth of the
Soil, Mysteries, and Pan, Hamsun was irrational, eccentric, strange, and compelling—a man uncomfortable in his own time.
Edvard Munch
Though he is more often viewed as a semi-lunatic Symbolist or proto-Expressionist, the great Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
was in fact a forerunner of much Modern art. His works concentrate on the human dramas of love and death, and on contemporary conditions
of claustrophobia and alienation--or what he called "the modern life of the soul"--frequently deploying contemporary effects to depict
this condition. He worked in paint, printmaking and photography (though he once wrote that "the camera cannot compete with a brush
and canvas, as long as it can't be used in heaven and hell"). Edvard Munch: Signs of Modern Art assesses the significance of Munch's
oeuvre as a highly independent contribution to Modern art, drawing on more than 100 paintings, as well as 60 drawings and prints.
In flouting the boundaries between the genres of painting and printmaking, in his work with photography and film, and through
his emphasis on process--for example exposing his paintings to outdoor weather--Munch opened up a turn-of-the-century view of the future.
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Fridtjof Nansen
Behind the great polar explorers of the early twentieth century Amundsen, Shackleton, Scott in the South, and Peary in the North
looms the spirit of Fridtjof Nansen, the mentor of them all. He was the father of modern polar exploration, the last act
of territorial discovery before the leap into space began. A restless, unquiet Faustian spirit, Nansen was a Renaissance
Man born out of his time in Norway. He was an adventurer, an artist and historian, and a diplomat who had dealings
with Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, and played a part in the Versailles Peace Conference.
Roald Amundsen
The true story of the first man to reach the South Pole. My life as an Explorer is a classic of Polar literature, written by
the one man to do more to further the exploration of both Polar regions than any other person. First sailing to the Antarctic
in the 1899 Belgian expedition, Amundsen never lost his passion for exploring, following this trip with a journey around the
top of Canada to prove the existence of the North West Passage between 1903 and 1906. Setting sail for the Antarctic a full
month or so after Scott, Amundsen still managed to beat the British team to the Pole by a full month. Making a lot of
money out of shipping during the First World War, Amundsen followed his epic journeys by being only the second man to
travel around d the to of Siberia from Atlantic to Pacific oceans, then flying over the North Pole by airship. He died in 1928.
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