Growth of the Soil
The Growth of the Soil is the novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. The essential elements of this novel are expressed in the words of the English translator W W Worster in his footnote in December 1920: "It is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian Highlands. It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm ..