West With the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa), in the early 1900s, leading to a career as a bush pilot there. It is considered a classic of outdoor literature, and in 2004, National Geographic Adventure ranked it number 8 in a list of 100 best adventure books.
There are some questions of whether Markham is the real author of her memoir West With The Night. According to the 1993 biography, "The Lives of Beryl Markham," by Errol Trzebinski, the book's real author was her third husband, the ghost writer and journalist Raoul Schumacher. Trzebinski also claimed that Beryl Markham had an advance from Houghton Mifflin to do a book on the famous international jockey Tod Sloan, that Raoul Schumacher was supposed to write. Apparently Schumacher never did, and she was forced to go it alone, resulting in a manuscript submission that the publisher rejected as worthless, and not from the same person who had written West With The Night.
Author Mary S. Lovell, who visited and stayed with Markham in Kenya shortly before Markham's death in 1986, expressed no doubts in Markham's biography that she was the sole author, although her third husband did edit the manuscript – but not in a major way. Ernest Hemingway was deeply impressed with Markham's writing, saying
| “ | "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 nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book." | ” |
Beryl Markham was the first pilot to fly the North Atlantic from east to west.
Famous quotes containing the words west and/or night:
“For some reason a nation feels as shy about admitting that it ever went forth to war for the sake of more wealth as a man would about admitting that he had accepted an invitation just for the sake of the food. This is one of humanity’s most profound imbecilities, as perhaps the only justification for asking one’s fellowmen to endure the horrors of war would be the knowledge that if they did not fight they would starve.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990)