Novels of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, pen name of Knut Pedersen, include Hunger (1890) and The Growth of the Soil (1917). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920. He insisted on the intricacies of the human mind as the main object of modern literature to describe the "whisper of the blood, and the pleading of the bone marrow." Hamsun pursued his literary program, debuting in 1890 with the psychological novel Hunger.