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4 unusual facts about West with the Night


A Soundless Echo

The letter discovered at the end of the episode is an excerpt from West with the Night by Beryl Markham.

West with the Night

Markham is often wrongly described as "the first person" to fly the Atlantic east to west in a solo non-stop flight, but that record belongs to Scottish pilot Jim Mollison, who attempted to fly from Dublin, Ireland, to New York City in 1932.

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.

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.


Kenyan literature

The best-known of these include Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen), whose Out of Africa was the basis for the popular film starring Meryl Streep; Elspeth Huxley, author of The Flame Trees of Thika; Margorie Oludhe Macgoye, whose Coming to Birth won the Sinclair Prize; and Beryl Markham, author of West with the Night.


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