FROM ‘HUNGER’

If the name Knut Hamsun meant anything to me before this year, it could only have been because of something I misunderstood--perhaps a cockamamie answer to a Jeopardy question about Scandinavian physicists. I have finally figured out who he really was. I wish I had realized sooner.

A few months ago, as I was preparing the afterword to the first book edition of George S. Schuyler’s 1930s serial, “Black Empire,” I read a letter that Schuyler wrote to W.E.B. Du Bois in 1928. While reviewing Du Bois’ novel, “Dark Princess,” Schuyler felt compelled to write directly to Du Bois to confess that his book “gripped me as no other has since Knut Hamsun’s ‘Hunger.’ ” I carefully read “Dark Princess,” which proved, to my satisfaction, to have profoundly influenced Schuyler’s amazing pulp serial about a worldwide black conspiracy. I looked at “Hunger,” but not closely. A mistake.

It was only when I read Judith Freeman’s essay that the full import of Schuyler’s allusion to “Hunger” sank in. Much of that 19th-Century Norwegian’s powerful story reads like the autobiography of the black Schuyler. No wonder the book meant something to him.

Thank you, Judith Freeman. I think I shall trust you on this one.

KENT RASMUSSEN, UCLA