Karen Blixen & Marilyn
Karen Blixen Museum (youtube)
Karen had one big wish for this trip was to meet Marilyn. Author Carson McCullers, Arthur Miller, Marilyn and Isak Dinesen here. (alternative link to youtube)
Three authors 
with Marilyn
On February 5, 1959 Marilyn Monroe, Karen Blixen, and Carson McCullers had lunch. Oh yeah, Arthur Miller was there, too. Taking place in Nyack, New York, the event was hosted by McCullers in honor of the great Karen Blixen, whose pen name, of course, is Isak Dinesen (Out of Africa). The menu consisted of soufflé, oysters, grapes and champagne. After lunch there was dancing. On the table top. On the solid marble table top, to be specific.(Sisters of the Tabletop)
Babbett’s Feast (part i), based on Isak’s short story, now you can see on youtube.
Out of Africa trailer <> <> “He was not mine” Meryl as Karen.
Isak Dinesen interview at Paris Review
I’d say things like “Wakamba na kula mamba” (“The Wakamba tribe eats snakes”), which in prose would have infuriated them, but which amused them mightily in rhyme. Afterwards they’d say, “Please, Memsabib, talk like rain,” so then I knew they had liked it, for rain was very precious to us there.
Karen Blixen [Isak Dinesen] can be compared with no other writers. Her voice was formed by her Scandinavian roots, and influenced by a wide variety of works of European literature. Her writing places emphasis on story, rather than characters, and on the philosophical understanding of personal identity. Her stories underline a fascination with the role of fate in controlling the lives of human beings. She believed that a person’s response to the vicissitudes of fate offers a possibility for heroism and, ultimately, for immortality.
A small selection of her literary influences include:
From Karen Blixen – Isak Dinesen
# Soren Kierkegaard: at least thirteen of Isak Dinesen’s tales are based, in part, on stories by the great Danish philosopher.
# The Viking sagas
# Shakespeare’s plays
# Mary Shelley
# Percy Bysshe Shelley
# Lord Byron
# Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
# Mozart’s Don Juan
# Milton’s Paradise Lost
# Charles Baudelaire
# Samuel Taylor Coleridge
# Walt Whitman
# Goethe
# Nietzche
# Heinrich Heine
# Havamal, the bible of the pagan Scandinavian cosmos
# The Greek myths
# The Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights)
# The Old and The New Testament