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The Ring Author Biography

Like Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Sigrid Undset, and Hermann Hesse, Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), whose real name was Karen Blixen, was born in the nineteenth century and to a great extent remained true to its Romantic ideals though she lived well into the twentieth century. They participated fully, if critically, in the great artistic, social, philosophical, and political phenomenon known as modernity. To mention Dinesen, a daughter of Danish nobility whose roots were traceable all the way back to the middle ages, in company with Spengler, Mann, Undset, and Hesse is to point out that her modernity, like theirs, was one of dissent which aimed at compensating for the modern flatness of life through the revival of an antique ethos. Like Spengler, whose Decline of the West (1919) colored the era, Dinesen saw European civilization as descended primarily from a Gothic, or what Spengler called a Faustian, vision of life: A...
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