Dinesen's "The Sailor-Boy's Tale" first appeared in Winter's Tales, her second collection of short stories, in 1942. The book title is based on the title of the Shakespeare play A Winter's Tale. Along with Seven Gothic Tales (1934), her first collection of stories, and Out of Africa (1937), the autobiographical account of her life in Kenya, it is considered one of her masterpieces. Judith Thurman, in Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, notes that Winter's Tales is

the most Danish of [Dinesen's] books, the most somber and introspective, the most luminous, and her own favorite. The tales are filled with a poetic feeling ... for the Danish landscape, its particular stillness and light; for the tempos and speech of rural Danish life and its mythology.

Winter's Tales secured Dinesen's international reputation as an important writer; Robert Langbaum, in The Gayety of Vision, observes,

it became clear after 1942, in the...