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Brandes promised Hamsun he would read his story and Hamsun left him his name and address. Hamsun's hands were trembling when he handed Brandes his manuscript and Brandes only accepted it because he felt so sorry for him. He had never seen anyone with such a desperate and hungry looking face. Brandes later said that the sight of Hamsun's face had almost made him cry. Hamsun was dressed like a beggar and looked extremely malnourished. When Hamsun visited Edvard Brandes at his office to offer him his manuscript, Brandes was shocked by Hamsun's appearance. He finally decided to find Edvard Brandes, literary editor of the ‘Politiken' newspaper and brother of the famous literary critic Georg Brandes. When he felt he could not write anymore Hamsun started roaming about Copenhagen with his manuscript wrapped in a newspaper. He wrote like a man obsessed, barely giving himself time to eat. At night when he was sleeping, he would wake up with more memories and wrote them down to work on them the next day.

He felt he was creating something of great importance and artistic value. The memories of Kristiania kept coming to him and he wrote like he had never done before. When the ship reached its final destination of Copenhagen, Hamsun disembarked and found a cheap attic room to rent. He found a bench to sit on, took a pencil and some paper out of his pockets, and started writing: ‘It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him…' He kept writing on the deck of the ‘Thingvalla' until it became too dark to see. He remembered how lonely and desperate he had felt in Kristiania. He remembered the girl he had fallen in love with, the times he stood outside her house waiting to catch a glimpse of her.

He remembered the people who had lent him money. He remembered the houses and the attic rooms where he had stayed, suffering from the cold. Hamsun walked around on the deck of the ship and the sight of the city of Kristiania brought back many painful memories of a time when he had wandered around that very same city, almost dying of hunger. The ship stayed in the Kristiania harbor for a full day but Hamsun felt he could not face the city where he had once lived in poverty, trying to become a successful writer. When, after about a week of traveling, the ship stopped at the harbor of Kristiania (the city now known as Oslo), Hamsun decided to stay on board.

In 1888, twenty-nine-year-old Knut Hamsun (born as Knud Pedersen) sat on board of the transatlantic ocean liner ‘Thingvalla', traveling back to his homeland Norway from the United States, where he had worked as a laborer, a trolley conductor, and a pastor's assistant.

The birth of the modern psychological novel