Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Edvard Munch, Caspar David Friedrich and Carl Johan Fahlcrantz. A Norwegian mother spoils her son, protects him from every consequence, and the beautiful hair of the title is the sign of everything she has let him become — until a girl is destroyed by it. Bjørnson won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1903, wrote the words Norwegians still sing as their national anthem, and quarreled publicly with everyone including Ibsen. The mother is drawn without a shred of sentiment. Fifty-eight plates, from Dürer to Munch, trace mothers and children across four centuries of European art, echoing the novel's fierce maternal bond.