An enthralling portrait and a classic of literary biography, winner of the 1983 National Book Award, Isak Dinesen remains the only comprehensive life story of the elusive aristocrat who wrote Seven Gothic Tales, Winter's Tales, Last Tales, and Out of Africa, the work that established her as one of the twentieth century's major writers. When Ernest Hemingway accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, he declared that Dinesen should have received it instead. Yet there was one tale that even this great Scheherazade could never tell: that of her true life. With exceptional grace, Judith Thurman's biography explores Dinesen's sheltered childhood in Denmark; her marriage to Baron Blixen, a hunter of game and women; her travails as a coffee farmer in the Kenyan highlands; and her romance with Denys Finch Hatton-and with Africa. Until the publication of this book, the life and art of Isak Dinesen had been-as she herself wrote of two lovers in a tale-"two caskets of which each contains the key to the other." Judith Thurman has provided the master key to them both. Book jacket.