Nonfiction· 1937· Nonfiction

Out of Africa

by Karen Blixen

Out of Africa: 1 recorded work traces back to it.

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Out of Africa

Film · 1985

AdaptationMEDIUM

Sydney Pollack's film takes its title and its narrator from Karen Blixen's memoir, and fills in the love story from Judith Thurman's biography and from Blixen's letters, because the memoir itself says very little about Denys Finch Hatton. An adaptation of a book that withholds the thing the film is about.

About the work

Out of Africa

Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the eighteen years when Blixen made her home in Kenya, then called British East Africa. The book is a lyrical meditation on Blixen's life on her coffee plantation, as well as a tribute to some of the people who touched her life there. It provides a vivid snapshot of African colonial life in the last decades under the British Empire. Blixen wrote the book in English and then rewrote it in Danish. The book has sometimes been published under the author's pen name, Isak Dinesen.