Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 60: Karen Blixen's effect on the world?

Q.  I don't know so much about Karen Blixen and her life, but we have just started a project in school about her. So now I have an assignment to ask people and try to find out what they think about it. I thought that you maybe want to share your thoughts about her effect on the world.

A.
Have you noticed clothing that has animals on it from East Africa: zebras, lions, giraffes? Have you seen in stores or catalogs khaki clothing that looks like safari outfits? Virtually all this clothing was inspired by the movie "Out of Africa" about Karen Blixen's life, which takes place in Kenya and won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1985.

Karen Blixen's style of writing has made an impression on a wide range of authors who have written about her, including John Updike, Truman Capote, Anais Nin, Carson McCullers, Peter Hoeg (who wrote Smilla's Sense of Snow) and most famously J. D. Salinger, who talks about Out of Africa in his novel The Catcher in the Rye. The famous director Orson Welles made a movie of one of her tales, "The Immortal Story," and other movies are in the planning stages.

"Babette's Feast" won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1986. Restaurants use the name Babette's Feast for special menus, and some have even taken the name for their business. Food from the story appears in many lists of recipes.

Karen Blixen's story "Babette's Feast" is a popular topic used by ministers in sermons, as you can see from looking up the topic on the internet. An opera made from this story was produced in London as recently as November 2002. A very popular ballet about Karen Blixen's life, called "Tanne," was seen by 50,000 people in Denmark. A species of white rose is named after Karen Blixen.

A large share of the tourist industry in Kenya is inspired by the 70,000 visitors to Karen Blixen's house every year. At least 60,000 tourists visit her house in Denmark every year. With Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen, Karen Blixen is one of the three most important Danish writers known around the world.

Karen Blixen's books have been continuously in print since they began to be published in the U.S. and England in the 1930s. In the U.S. alone, over a million copies of Out of Africa are in circulation. New books are published about Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) nearly every year. Translations of her works continue to mushroom, with new ones recently in Poland, Hungary, Korea, and China. 90,000 visitors from 80 countries visit this website every year looking for information about her.

Copyright © 2002 by Linda Donelson. All rights reserved.