Familien de Cats.

About Familien de Cats

"Familien de Cats" was the third short story written by the Danish writer Karen Blixen under the pen name Osceola, a famous early 19th-century Native American leader. Published in the literary journal Tilskueren in January 1909, it followed "Eneboerne" and "Pløjeren", both published in 1907. It tells the story of a law-abiding family which in each generation has a black sheep who turns out to be its secret blessing. Although Blixen, then Karen Dinesen, wrote hundreds of pages of poems, essays and stories in her youth, it was only when she was 22 that she began to publish some of her short stories in literary journals as Osceola which had also been the name of her father's dog. Like her other early short stories, at the time it failed to attract attention.