West with the Night

" ranked it number 8 in a list of 100 best adventure books [ [http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0404/adventure_books.html "National Geographic Adventure": 100 Best Adventure Books] .]

There are some questions that 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 cquote|"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 [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

Notes

Beryl Markham was one of the first pilots ever to fly the North Atlantic from east to west.