more than a marriage of convenience
Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro chats with Ars about her latest book, The Aviator and the Showman.
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Famed aviator Amelia Earhart has captured our imaginations for nearly a century, particularly her disappearance in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Earhart was a complicated woman, highly skilled as a pilot yet with a tendency toward carelessness. And her marriage to a flamboyant publisher with a flair for marketing may have encouraged that carelessness and contributed to her untimely demise, according to a fascinating new book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon.
Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a longtime Earhart fan. A documentary filmmaker and journalist, she first read about Earhart in a short biography distributed by Scholastic Books. “I got a little obsessed with her when I was younger,” Shapiro told Ars. The fascination faded as she got older and launched her own career. But she rediscovered her passion for Earhart while writing her 2018 book, The Stowaway, about a young man who stowed away on Admiral Richard Byrd‘s first voyage to Antarctica. The marketing mastermind behind the boy’s journey and his subsequent (ghost-written) memoir was publisher George Palmer Putnam, Earhart’s eventual husband.
