An outstanding example of psychologically driven modernist fiction, Knut Hamsun's Hunger portrays a struggling artist's descent into madness as his body and mind succumb to starvation.
Knut Hamsun's Hunger, first published in 1890 and hailed as the literary beginning of the twentieth century, is a masterpiece of psychologically driven fiction. The story of a struggling artist living on the edge of starvation, the novel portrays the unnamed first-person narrator's descent into paranoia, despair and madness as hunger overtakes him. As the protagonist loses his grip on reality, Hamsun brilliantly portrays the disturbing and irrational recesses of the human mind through increasingly disjointed and urgent prose.