The aviator and the showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the marriage that made an American icon
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In 1928, a young social worker and hobby pilot named Amelia Earhart arrived in the office of George Putnam, heir to the G.P. Putnam's Sons publishing throne and hitmaker, who was on the hunt for the right woman for a secret flying mission across the Atlantic. A partnership--professional and soon otherwise--was born. The Aviator and the Showman unveils the untold story of Earhart's decade-long marriage to Putnam, offering an intimate exploration of their relationship and the pivotal role it played in her enduring legacy. Despite her outwardly modest and humble image, Earhart was fiercely driven and impossibly brave, a lifelong feminist and trailblazer in her personal and professional life. Putnam, the so-called PT Barnum of publishing, was a bookselling visionary--but often pushed his authors to extreme lengths in the name of publicity, and no one bore that weight more than Earhart. Their ahead-of-its time partnership supported her grand ambitions, but it also pressed her into more and more treacherous stunts to promote her books, influencing a certain recklessness up to and including her final flight. Earhart is a captivating figure, but the truth about her life is often overshadowed by myth and legend. Drawing from a trove of new sources including previously undiscovered audio interviews, author and filmmaker Laurie Gwen Shapiro emphasizes Earhart's multifaceted human side, her struggles, and her authentic aspirations, the truths behind her brave pursuits and the compromises she made to fit into societal expectations.