The Segelfoss Novels:
Children of the Age & Segelfoss Town
Peter Marchant
October 4, 2022
ISBN 9798218064556 / Paperback / 702 pages / $24.99

This volume brings together J. S. Scott's English translations of Knut Hamsun's Segelfoss novels—Children of the Age (Børn av Tiden, 1913) and Segelfoss Town (Segelfoss By, 1915)—two major works by the 1920 Nobel Prize–winning author, presented here in a single combined edition.

The novels mark Hamsun's first sustained engagement with social issues and modernity. Set against a Norwegian society in transition, they chart the decline of the landed gentry and the emergence of a new working class. Yet these novels are far from programmatic social critique. As Monika Žagar observes in Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance (2009), they are "much more than dry social analysis; indeed, they investigate, in rich novelistic form, the propagation and survival of a family."

"Hamsun's art at its best"
— The Literary Digest International Book Review, 1924

“Among the best of Hamsun's works. . . . minute in detail and yet its significance is sweeping."
— Detroit Free Press, 1925

Publisher's note: These two novels were published by Tough Poets Press separately in 2020 and 2021 but enough typos were since identified by a couple of meticulous readers that I felt a corrected edition was warranted.