Children of the Age

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New edition of J.S. Scott’s 1924 English translation of Children of the Age (original title: Born av Tiden) by Knut Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.

Hamsun described it 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) website 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.

This new edition is not simply a scan of the original. It has been completely reformatted and redesigned. Spelling errors and other typos that appeared in the original Alfred A. Knopf edition have been corrected.