Who was responsible for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart? Was it her oft-drunk but undeniably brilliant navigator, Fred Noonan? Her publicist husband, George Putnam, who pushed his wife toward the PR stunt of the century despite her relative mediocrity as a pilot? Or was it Earhart herself, whose sudden fame had begun to cloud the thing a pilot needs most: her judgment?

Journalist Laurie Gwen Shapiro — a contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic — spent five years going where no Earhart biographer had gone before. What she found isn't the flawless icon, but a real and complicated woman. Today, Laurie gives us a portrait of the person behind the legend and a deep dive into Earhart's final flight and July 1937 disappearance over the Pacific: a stretched budget, a dropped antenna on the Lockheed Electra, an alcoholic navigator hired because he was cheap, and a pilot who was sick, exhausted, and out of fuel as she searched for tiny Howland Island.

We get into the enduring mystery and the theories it spawned — and why the real story of what happened to Amelia Earhart may be sadder, and more human, than any of them.

Shapiro's book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon, was named a New Yorker Best Book of 2025.

 

Laurie Gwen Shapiro Website

Amelia Earhart Project Recordings

The Aviator and the Showman

 

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