Restless and unwilling to spend his days at Bodö as a shoemaker, he worked for a short while as coal heaver, and later as road-maker and school-teacher and sheriff’s assistant. Then, like so many Scandinavian youths, he decided to emigrate to America. Some of these earlier experiences are recalled in his novels, _A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings_ and _Under the Autumn Star_ (in the English edition united as _Wanderers_). In the United States he drifted from one occupation to another and covered a wide range of pursuits as street-car conductor, farm laborer, clerk in grocery store and lecturer. He cherished hopes of literary chances in this country but the lack of them, and the misfortunes that came upon him, made him bitter for a time, in retrospect. Those who recalled him on the Halstead street-car line in Chicago, and later on a cable line, affirmed that he had “a perpetual stare into the horizon,” that he was “out-at-elbows” and had small volumes of classic poets sticking out of his pockets.[127] They add that he would forget to ring the bell for passengers or would fall over their feet in his reverie. One is skeptical of such detailed memories of famous men. In the summer of 1885, he was back in Christiania, doing some journalistic work and lecturing. Hanna Arstrup Larsen in her authoritative study of Knut Hamsun[128] says that he had been at the University of Christiania, before he went to America; but that he found he was a misfit and went back to his “old life on the road.”[129]