Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 96: Isak Dinesen and Ernest Hemingway?

Q.� I read that when Hemingway received the Nobel prize in 1954, he said that it should have gone instead to Karen Blixen. Is that true?

�A.� In an interview after receiving the Nobel Prize, Hemingway said, "As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive� the prize. I would have been happy--happier--today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen. . . ." [The New York Times Book Review, November 7, 1954]