WEST WITH THE NIGHT by Markham Beryl - 1942

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942. First Edition, second state without the date to the title page. 8vo, publisher's original green cloth, lettered in black on the spine and upper cover, in the pictorially decorated dustjacket. x, 294 pp. A very handsome, bright and clean copy, the dustjacket complete and without significant wear, unusually well preserved, only slightly mellowed at the spine panel and with miniscule evidence of shelving. The dustjacket for the book is normally affected by damage and loss. FIRST EDITION OF THIS REMARKABLE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WORK. Beryl Markham twice became a figure of international renown. In 1936, when she became the first person ever to fly solo across the Atlantic the hard way--against the headwinds--from England to North America, and again in 1942 when this memoir was published to worldwide acclaim. As the author wrote,' Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world, or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot o people as to myself, it is just "home." It is all these things, but one thing--it is never dull.'
The author arrived in British East Africa at the age of four, where her father had a farm for training race horses, and where a zebra foal attaching itself to a throughbrd horse, or a 'tame' lion pouncing on a little girl wre all in a day's work. Her childhood days were spent with native hunter on the trail of wild pig, barefoot, armed only with a spear. She raced horses, ran the farm at times and then learned to fly. She was the first woman mail pilot in the world, she flew over jungle and desert. In her small plane she carried oxygen cylinders to men dying in jungle mining camps, scouted for elephan, and wrote her impressions on flights to Cairo, Salum, Benghazi, Tobruk and other exotic ports. A remarkable book, by a remarkable human being.