Published in 2022 (first published 1982)
512 pages
Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000. She writes about fashion, books, and culture. Her subjects have included André Malraux, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Cristóbal Balenciaga.
Thurman is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, (1999), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, and the Salon Book Award for biography. The Dinesen biography served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s movie Out of Africa. A collection of her New Yorker essays, Cleopatra’s Nose, was published in 2007. Thurman lives in New York.
What is this book about?
A brilliant literary portrait, Isak Dinesen remains the only comprehensive biography of one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Her magnificent memoir, Out of Africa, established Isak Dinesen as a major twentieth-century author, who was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.
With exceptional grace, Judith Thurman ‘s classic work explores Dinesen’s life–her privileged but unhappy childhood in Denmark, her marriage to Baron Blixen, their immigration to Africa on the eve of World War I, and her passionate affair with Denys Finch Hatton. Until the appearance of this book, the life and art of Isak Dinesen have been–as Dinesen herself wrote of two lovers in a tale–“a pair of locked caskets, each containing the key to the other.” Judith Thurman has provided the master key to them both.
