A Study Guide for Isak Dinesen's "Out of Africa"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Isak Dinesen's "Out of Africa," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535830416

Book preview

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Out of Africa

Isak Dinesen

1937

Introduction

Isak Dinesen's autobiographical novel, Out of Africa, recounts the years she spent on a coffee plantation in East Africa. Published in 1937, the book garnered critical and popular acclaim, especially in Britain and the United States. The award-winning 1985 film version, which won an Oscar for best picture, prompted a resurgence of interest in the book and helped place it on the best-seller list several years after her death.

Out of Africa comprises a series of Dinesen's observations of the African landscape and the character sketches of the East Africans and transplanted Europeans she met there. In her article in the New York Times Book Review, Katherine Woods maintains, "Africa lives through all this beautiful and heart-stirring book because of that simple and unsought-for fusion of the spirit, lying behind the skill which can put the sense of Africa's being into clear, right, simple words, through the things and people of the