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 TODAY IN LITERARY HISTORY: April 17
Birth of Danish author Isak Dinesen. (1885 – 1962)
Isak Dinesen, whose finely crafted stories, set in the past and pervaded with an aura of supernaturalism, incorporate the themes of eros and dreams was the pseudonym of Karen Blixen.

Dinesen married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, in 1914 and went with him to Africa. There they owned and directed a coffee plantation in Kenya and became big-game hunters. After her divorce in 1921 she continued to operate the plantation for 10 years until mismanagement, drought, and the falling price of coffee forced her return to Denmark.
 

 The book is a poetic reminiscence of her triumphs and her sorrows on the loss of her farm, the death of her companion, the English hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and the disappearance of the simple African way of life she admired.

In 1944 she produced her only novel The Angelic Avengers under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. It is a melodramatic tale of innocents who defeat their apparently benevolent but actually evil captor, but Danish readers saw in it a clever satire of Nazi-occupied Denmark.


Storytelling is actually a part of some of her stories, that is, stories are told within the stories; and characters are sometimes archetypes rather than fully fleshed-out people. She wrote of her work:

Isak Dinesen, whose finely crafted stories, set in the past and pervaded with an aura of supernaturalism, incorporate the themes of eros and dreams was the pseudonym of Karen Blixen

Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, an account of her life while living in Kenya, and for one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Blixen was considered several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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