Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859 - February 19, 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 20 novels, a collection of poetry, some short stories and plays, a travelogue, works of non-fiction and some essays. The young Hamsun objected to realism and naturalism. He argued that the main object of modernist literature should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should describe the whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone marrow .