[1][2][5] On the younger Carl Joachim's date of birth, 7 June 1914, his father, for whom he was named, made a speech at the Jubilee Exhibition in the Frogner Park, which commemorated the 1814 constitution.
[2] The twins Edvard and Cato were Carl's elder brothers, who both made success within the Anglosphere: the former became the 25th President of the United Nations General Assembly and a respected legal scholar,[6][7] whilst the latter became board member of the World Federation for Mental Health.
[9][10] Living in the Uranienborg neighbourhood of Western Oslo, the Hambro family belonged to the upper-class society of early 20th-century Norway,[2] and was, according to biographer Tormod Petter Svennevig, intellectually engaged;[6] its forebears included both businesspeople and women's rights activists, of whom many were active in politics.
[1] He was assistant teacher in French at the University of Oslo from 1963 to 1965;[16] in that position he bemoaned the insufficient command of his students in their own mother tongue, maintaining that the Norwegian language should be used more actively in foreign-language tuition.
[18][20] After a few unsuccessful novels in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hambro pivoted towards non-fiction, especially focusing on linguistics and politics, fields of interest that he shared with his father, who had become fascinated by Sanskrit and East Asian poetry during his philology studies.
[21] The younger Hambro's most well-known and successful book within linguistics was the 1969 Ting, tanke, tale ("Thing, Thought, Speech"), followed by Språket i funksjon ("Language in Operation") in 1972.
[26] Hambro's obituarist Finn Jor described him as a man fond of debate with a keen interest in societal issues, yet who was no front person in public discourse, not possessing the eloquence of his father.
[1] His love for France was not inherited from his parents, however: the elder Carl Joachim and Dudu were fervent anglophiles, the former having both written and translated English-language works, and the latter having been a voracious reader of Anglo-American novelists ranging from Rudyard Kipling to Aldous Huxley.
[29] The elder Hambro was also, according to literary scholar Per Thomas Andersen, vital for the next literary work of the younger Hambro: he provided biographical context for a trilogy comprising the novels Frels oss fra det gode (1963; "Deliver Us From the Good"), Utfor stryket (1964; "Down the River") and Vi vil oss en drøm (1966; "We Want a Dream"), which describe the adolescence of a young man named Nico Dietmeyer.
[32] Dahl maintained that these novels constituted an unpretentious, yet clear-eyed criticism of conformity in that milieu, whilst Andersen considered them stories about double standards and liberation from one's own father.
[1][34] The last novel of his trilogy about Nico Dietmeyer was released in November of the same year; Lorentzen deemed the first part of the book to be somewhat verbose, inconclusive and unoriginal, yet also well-written.
[30] In 1967 Hambro released Bjørnen sover ("The Bear Is Sleeping"), a marriage novel that disappointed the critics,[18][35] before publishing his semantic and psycholinguistic study Ting, tanke, tale ("Thing, Thought, Speech") in 1969.
[1][23] The journalist Iver Tore Svenning recognized that work as one of the very few successful attempts at a popular scientific treatment of structural linguistics,[36] a view supported by Dahl.
[43] Hambro's good reputation dwindled with the years, especially following his vehement defence of the writers Agnar Mykle and Bjørneboe,[44] who had been brought to court for their soft-core pornographic novels.