“In the summer of 1884 his doctor diagnosed ‘galloping consumption,’ 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.”
“In [1891], he travelled from one Norwegian city to another giving a series of lectures in which, among other things, he singled out the leading contemporary Norwegian writers for scathing criticism. Ibsen was present at the lecture he gave in Kristiania in October 1891, sitting impassively in the front row beside Edvard Grieg and his wife, while young Hamsun faulted him and his writer colleagues, Lie, Kielland, and Bjornson, for having produced a literature woefully lacking in imagination and psychological sophistication.”
from an Introduction to 'Pan' by Sverre Lyngstad
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