Isak Dinesen's extraordinary life and work are now presented in Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. One of the great figures in twentieth century literature is Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Baroness Karen Blixen). At the age of twenty-seven, she left Denmark and sailed for East Africa to marry her Swedish cousin, Baron Bror Blixen. Together they bought a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in Kenya. For the next seventeen years she managed the plantation, even after she and her husband separated, and she recorded the experience in two memorable books, Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, both of which are filled with her affection for and understanding of the land and its people. The movie Out of Africa, produced and directed by Sydney Pollack, written by Kurt Luedtke, and with Kim Jorgensen as Executive Producer, is also based on Judith Thurman's Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller; Errol Trze-binski's Silence Will Speak; and Isak Dinesen's Letters from Africa.