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Knut HamsunKnut Hamsun:
The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance
By Monika Zagar

The Los Angeles Times calls Knut Hamsun "a superb academic study."

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was a towering figure of Norwegian letters. He was also a Nazi sympathizer and supporter of the German occupation of Norway during the Second World War. In 1943, Hamsun sent his Nobel medal to Third-Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as a token of his admiration and authored a reverential obituary for Hitler in May 1945. For decades, scholars have wrestled with the dichotomy between Hamsun's merits as a writer and his infamous ties to Nazism.

In her incisive study of Hamsun, Monika Zagar refuses to separate his political and cultural ideas from an analysis of his highly regarded writing. Her analysis reveals the ways in which messages of racism and sexism appear in plays, fiction, and none-too-subtle nonfiction produced by a prolific author over the course of his long career. In the process, Zagar illuminates Norway's changing social relations and long history of interaction with other peoples. Making the case that Hamsun's support of Nazi political ideals was a natural outgrowth of his reactionary aversion to modernity, Knut Hamsun serves as a corrective to scholarship treating Hamsun's Nazi ties as unpleasant but peripheral details in a life of literary achievement.

Monika Zagar is associate professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Minnesota.

"Knut Hamsun is a very important contribution not only to the study of Knut Hamsun's oeuvre but also to the general study of literature. By asking the question of how Hamsun's works have been affected by his political and social attitudes, Zagar offers an instructive example of how crucial it is not to separate literary works from the context that enabled them." - Jan Sjavik, University of Washington

"Zagar makes a strong case for the importance of discussing Hamsun's views on modernity, race, genetics, eugenics, and gender to understand his 'repugnant' politics." - Anne Sabo, St. Olaf College
River of RenewalRiver of Renewal: Myth and History in the Klamath Basin
By Stephen Most

The documentary River of Renewal, by Stephen Most and based on the book, will air on 770 PBS stations around the United States. To find a station near you, please click here.

"Most tells these stories in the voices of the protagonists, who give the basin's complex history an illuminating immediacy that infuses the entire book. It is a mark of his achievement that he has been able to make these historical, cultural, and environmental pieces into a comprehensive whole. River of Renewal is the best source available for those wishing to think clearly about this cumulative tragedy, as well as a first-rate model for regional land use anywhere in the American West." - Orion Magazine

A land of mountains, forests, wetlands, lakes, and rivers, the Klamath Basin spans the Oregon-California state line. Farms and ranches, logging towns, and back-to-the-land communities are scattered over this 10-million-acre bioregion. There are Indian reservations at the headwaters, at the estuary, and across the major tributary of the Klamath River. In this place that has witnessed, ever since the Gold Rush, a succession of wars and resource conflicts, myths of the West loom large, amplifying differences among its inhabitants.

At the core of the contemporary controversy is overallocation of the waters of the Klamath Basin. This dispute has pitted farmers and ranchers against those whose cultures and livelihoods depend upon fishing and others who would forestall the extinction of wild salmon. Yet it has also revealed the unity of the Klamath Basin, the interdependence of economic recovery with ecological restoration, and the urgency for all the communities within the Basin to find common ground.

Stephen Most is a playwright and documentary storyteller. He has contributed to numerous documentary films, including Emmy Award winners Wonders of Nature and Promises and the Academy Award-nominated Berkeley in the Sixties. His plays Medicine Show, Watershed, and A Free Country dramatize events in Pacific Northwest history.