Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942. First Edition. Cloth over boards. Octavo. x, 294 pages.

Markham's poetic memoir chronicles her life as a skilled horse trainer, and adventurer in colonial Kenya. She was also a trailblazing aviator, becoming the first person to fly non-stop from England to North America with her record flight in 1936.

Hemingway greatly admired Markham's book. In a contemporary letter he writes: "Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? ... 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 this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book."

Very good in a very good, unclipped dust jacket with some restorations. Bound in pale green cloth over boards with spine and upper board titled in black. Minor fading to top and bottom board edges, faint foxing to endpapers, shallow extremity bumps. Jacket has professional paper restorations at head and heel of spine, and along joint and fore edge folds. An attractive copy of this elusive true first printing.

Item #1841

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