A new edition of a great, underappreciated classic of our time
Beryl Markham's West with the Night is a true classic, a book that
deserves the same acclaim and readership as the work of her
contemporaries Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Isak
Dinesen.
If the first responsibility of a memoirist is to lead a life worth
writing about, Markham succeeded beyond all measure. Born Beryl
Clutterbuck in the middle of England, she and her father moved to Kenya
when she was a girl, and she grew up with a zebra for a pet; horses for
friends; baboons, lions, and gazelles for neighbors. She made money by
scouting elephants from a tiny plane. And she would spend most of the
rest of her life in East Africa as an adventurer, a racehorse trainer,
and an aviatrix--she became the first person to fly nonstop from Europe
to America, the first woman to fly solo east to west across the
Atlantic. Hers was indisputably a life full of adventure and beauty.
And then there is the writing. When Hemingway read Markham's book, he
wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins: She has written so well, and
marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer .
. . [She] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as
writers . . . It is really a bloody wonderful book.
With a new introduction by Sara Wheeler--one of Markham's few legitimate
literary heirs--West with the Night should once again take its place
as one of the world's great adventure stories.
