Anti-heroes in European fiction : Hunger

Knut Hamsun's novel "Hunger" (1920, Robert Bly translation) is one of those European vintage specials - lonely and depressed outsider who cannot fit into society in any conventional fashion and imagines himself smarter/better/more ethically pure than everyone else narrates the story of his life, or or a few days in his life: in this case the narrator seems to my nonclinical eye a classic case of bipolar disorder, living in abject poverty (hence the title) in Norwegian port city and his only source of income short articles he submits to the various local newspapers (those days long gone!), he has times when he writes in a frenzy and believes he's creating a work of genius other times when he stares at blank pages - in some ways not atypical of any writer's experience, but here carried to manic extremes, emphasized by his weird behavior - stalking a woman across the city, screaming at a blind man who shares his park bench; when he can no longer afford his tiny room he walks off to a forest outside the city limits and sleeps, badly, on the wet ground - he could be any of the homeless we see today in any city, confused and a danger primarily to themselves, and in some cases harboring a rich interior life - in fact he does sell one of his essays for a pretty good sum to one of the papers, and his account of his life is sharply detailed and painfully honest - he is the literary descendent of Dostoyevsky's "underground man" and the antecedent of Camus's "stranger" - and who would be his American counterpart? Maybe Holden Caulfield, but the contrast between the two - Caulfield sweet and innocent in some ways and full of youthful bravura, and Hamsun's narrator weird and embittered: to make a vast generalization, the American "anti-hero" is an independent advocate who offers a critique of society and, ultimately, heroically turns his back on it (I prefer not to) or heads out for the territory; the European anti-hero is more hopeless and full of despair and completely uncared-for by any other social figure - if you don't fit neatly into a class in 19th- or 20th-century Europe, you are completely underground. Note: I have since learned that the publication date for Hunger is 1890; 1920 is I think its English-language pub date. Makes Hunger even more of precursor than I'd thought.