The Kansas-born aviator was a heroine of the Midwest in her day. But her legend was forged in Midtown Manhattan.
Amelia Earhart in 1932, the year she became the first woman to make a nonstop solo trans-Atlantic flight.Credit...The New York Times
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By John Freeman Gill
The life of Amelia Earhart has often been framed as a Midwestern story, the homespun tale of an adventurous tomboy who at age 7 sledded down an icy hill in Kansas, barely escaping a disastrous collision with a horse by speeding between its legs. The biography that the journalist Laurie Gwen Shapiro read as a child described Earhart as a girl gazing up at Halley’s comet as it shot across the sky above the nation’s Heartland.
