Out of Africa

Random House, New York, 1938. 1st US Edition. Bound in fine in two tone cloth, black cloth spine in gilt. And cinnamon cloth-covered boards stamped with gilt flamingo. Very clean and tight throughout. In a good but worn, chipped and repaired pictorial dust jacket with the original price of $2.75 at the top of the inside front flap. With a list of notable recent and forthcoming Random House Fiction on the rear panel.

Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, an account of her life while living in Kenya, and for one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen 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 of 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