Segelfoss Town

New edition of J. S. Scott's 1925 English translation of Segelfoss Town (original title: Segelfoss By) by Knut Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920.




Segelfoss Town was first published in Norway in 1915 and is an independent continuation of Hamsun's Children of the Age, published two years earlier. The novel is a criticism of modern times, depicting the fall of the landed gentry and the rise of the working class. Segelfoss Town and its predecessor were the first of Hamsun's novels devoted to social issues. The two novels are described by Monika Zagar in Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance (2009) as "much more than dry social analysis; indeed, they investigate, in rich novelistic form, the propagation and survival of a family."