Children of the Age

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924. First American Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. 0x0x0. First American edition. Lacks jacket, though a portion of the rear jacket panel is affixed to the front paste-down endpaper. Pencil name and address on front endpaper. 1924 Hard Cover. 287, [1] pp. Navy blue cloth, orange and green titles and decorations. Translated from the Norwegian by J.S. Scott. Hamsun won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature for Growth of the Soil. This and other works were likely translated and published in response to him receiving the prize. From the jacket blurb: Since Growth of the Soil made Knut Hamsun famous outside his own country (truncated) Children of the Age is the first novel of his to appear in English which ranks with that masterpiece... Hamsun tells in this powerful characterization [of Lieutenant Willatz Holmsen] of the process of decay and disintegration." "Hamsun described [Children of the Age] as 'a novel about the war between the aristocrat and the peasant.' The Encyclopedia of the Novel (2014) called it 'a historically based--and utterly scathing--critique of modernity.' And the Hamsun Centre (Hamsunsenteret) wrote: 'In Children of the Age a family's rise and fall are used to describe the decline and fall of a whole epoch. Thematically the novel has similarities to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901), with Hamsun's humour being the stylistic difference between the two.' Children of the Age was a commercial success when it was first published in Norway in 1913. Isaac Anderson, writing in The Literary Digest International Book Review (1924), described it as 'Hamsun's art at its best,' and, while concluding that was 'not so great a novel as Growth of the Soil,' it had the same epic quality, and 'deserves, and undoubtedly will have, a high place among the novels of our time. (Inventory #: 2343308)