West With the Night.

MARKHAM, Beryl.

Item Number: 114299

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942.

First edition, early printing of Markham’s classic autobiography. Octavo, original cloth. In very good condition, contemporary names to the front free endpaper.

In 1939, three years after she became the first aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from London to North America, Beryl Markham moved to the United States where she began writing her autobiography. Published in 1942, the book was favorably received, and revealed in detail the story of her childhood in British East Africa, her career as a horse trainer and bush pilot, and her pioneering transatlantic flight. Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter to editor Maxwell Perkins: "Did you read Beryl Markham s book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer s log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and some times making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people s stories, are absolutely true I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book." Named by Modern Library as one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of the twentieth century and by National Geographic Adventure ranking it number 8 in a list of 100 best adventure books.