Beryl Markham

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Beryl Markham (26 October 1902 - 3 August 1986), was a British-born Kenyan author, pilot, horse trainer and adventurer.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Beryl Markham was born Beryl Clutterbuck on 26 October 1902, in Melton Mowbray[1], Leicestershire[1], England. When she was four years old, her father moved the family to Kenya, which was then British East Africa. Although her mother, Clara, disliked the isolation and promptly returned to England, Beryl stayed in Kenya with her father, where she spent an adventurous childhood learning, playing and hunting with the natives. On her family's farm, she developed a knowledge of, and love for horses.

As a young adult, she trained horses, becoming the first licensed female horse trainer in Kenya. She later took up flying, becoming a bush pilot and the first person to fly the Atlantic Ocean east to west (solo non-stop flight). These experiences were chronicled in her critically acclaimed memoir, West With The Night, published in 1942.

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

“ "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." ”

After living for many years in the United States, Markham moved back to Kenya in 1952, becoming, before her death in 1986, for a time, the most successful horse trainer in the country.

The IAU has named the impact crater Markham on the planet Venus after her.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Beryl Markham, from Encyclopedia Britannica Student Edition, online.

[edit] References

  • Markham, Beryl. West with the Night. New York: North Point Press, 1942, reprinted 1983. ISBN 0-86547-118-5.
  • Lovell, Mary S. Straight on Till Morning: The Biography of Beryl Markham St Martins Press, 1987. ISBN 0-312-01096-6
  • Trzebinski, Errol.The Lives of Beryl Markham. New York: W.W. Norton. 1993. ISBN 0-393-03556-5.

[edit] External links

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