Author Laurie Gwen Shapiro focuses on the man behind Amelia Earhart in new biography The Aviator and the Showman

Amelia Earhart and husband George Putnam. 1931 source: International News Photos, // Wikimedia Commons

Documentarian and journalist Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s forthcoming book is about an Atchison, KS native who has (most likely) been dead since 1937.

The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon hits shelves July 15. The book will also debut at the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum in Atchison on Friday, the 18 at the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum, as part of the 2025 Amelia Earhart Festival.

Library of Congress

Shapiro is a professor of journalism at New York University and has written a previous non-fiction book about a teenager who stowed aboard an Antarctic expedition. She also produced the documentaries Finishing Heaven and Keep the River on the Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Slate, The New Yorker and Lapham’s Quarterly.

Local historian Candice Millard (River of the Gods) says, “Before reading The Aviator and the Showman, I thought I understood Amelia Earhart. I could not have been more wrong. As Shipiro proves in this irresistible book, the full take is so much more thrilling, inspiring, and outrageous than even the most ardent fan might imagine.”

Contacted by phone last week, Shapiro explained that a wide variety of people are still fascinated by Earhart’s achievements in aviation and by what led to her plane’s disappearance over the Pacific Ocean as she attempted to fly across the globe.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m anywhere in the United States, if I’m in a taxi, or if I’m on the subway or if I’m on vacation. Everyone has an opinion. But the question I get asked the most, mostly by men, is what happened to her. ‘Do you have a theory about where she went?’ They’re fascinated by the mystery. And that is really different than a lot of the women that I speak to who say, ‘She was my idol growing up. She was my hero.’ They really want to know different things.”

From reading The Airman and the Showman, Earhart’s fate, as well as that of her navigator Fred Noonan, is clear and somewhat mundane. Shapiro said, “From most of the people who were really clued into this, including the Smithsonian Institute, including the Atchison people at the Hangar Museum, know that almost certainly they ran out of gas and are underwater.

“That doesn’t drive controversy.”

What drove controversy and helped elevate Earhart from being a 31-year-old social worker who was capable of flying into an aviation icon was the obsessive drive of publisher George Palmer Putnam.

“Double Found for Lindy” Evening star (Washington, D.C.), June 5, 1928 credit: Library of Congress

Having achieved formidable sales for memoirs by polar explorer Admiral Richard Byrd and Charles Lindbergh, who was the first pilot to cross the Atlantic nonstop, Putnam was eager to find a “Lady Lindy” to sate the public’s appetite for courageous adventurers.

“We’ve heard of Amelia Earhart and would not have if it hadn’t been for George Putnam,” said Shapiro. “She did know how to fly, but she was a hobby pilot.”

After meeting Putnam in 1928, she successfully crossed the Atlantic alone in 1932, despite having a faulty altimeter, and became a forceful advocate for aviation and the cause of women’s participation in it.

Putnam divorced his first wife (a scion of the Crayola fortune) and married Earhart. While she has become a legend, he is known for being, um, loose with his ethics.

For The Man Who Killed Hitler, a book supposedly written by a secret anti-Nazi, he found a unique way to promote it. He boasted that German operatives were doing everything they could to keep the book from making it to the shelves.

“I actually put a lot of my advance into photos because I wanted to show George Putnam faking his own kidnapping,” Shapiro explained. “If you see a picture of George Putnam with a gun to his head faking his kidnapping, that’s pretty powerful.”

Amelia Earhart and husband George Putnam. 1931 source: International News Photos, wikimedia commons

“One of the last biographers who worked with the (Putnam) family said that ‘I would love to have dinner with him.’ He’s the kind of guy that was very nice to people in power and would squash anyone that was deemed removable, the kind of guy who would bully a teenager like Elinor Smith (a rival aviator).”

Some of his decisions may also have made his second wife’s flights more dangerous. Putnam wanted the book tied to her fatal mission out before Christmas. Shapiro recalls, “There’s a long interview with (Earhart friend Louise Thaden) where she’s saying Amelia wanted to wait until the next year. George was saying that it’s already funded. We’ve already spent the money from the book contract with Harcourt Brace.”

He was also part of the problem when it came to establishing the truth about his wife’s fate. “He had actually spoken to a lot of people who knew Amelia Earhart. He was making up stuff about her being taken by the Japanese. He was saying this in his book.”

Shapiro has also unearthed facts on Earhart that have been neglected or ignored in previous accounts of her life. Some are potentially jaw-dropping, while others remind readers why she is still admired.

“I wanted to show she had a sugar daddy (billboard magnate Thomas Humphrey Bennett Varney, whom she almost married even though he was decades her senior),” said Shapiro.

“She did not have biological children. Both of her stepchildren were interviewed on tape at length for hours. They absolutely loved her. The older stepson, David Binney Putnam, she taught him how to fly, and he was a very important pilot in World War II.”

If anything from the myths of Earhart is true, it’s certainly her courage. Cowards don’t make it across the Atlantic. “Even if the trips that she made it, that she’s famous for like going across the Atlantic or going to Mexico or Hawaii, they were very risky, and things weren’t going to so great all the time, but she made it, so we only know that she made it and that she was brave,” Shapiro said.

“We start to believe our own luck if we have a string of good luck. It’s not unlike a gambler.”

Library of Congress

Knowing the facts Shapiro unearthed from off-the-record portions of taped interviews and other sources, the real Earhart is likely to continue inspiring others to chase the unknown, even if she is more flesh-and-blood in the new book.

Shapiro said, “The first biography I ever read was a Scholastic kids biography that starts with her in Kansas looking up at the sky and wanting to fly. There’s a comet. It’s not what happened, and she wasn’t even interested in flying until much later. Why are people so scared of the truth?”

Getting to that truth took about four years and a sacrifice that Shapiro says all biographers should consider making in order to get the story right.

“When you do a mainstream publisher like Viking, you get a pretty good advance. The dumb move is not to spend any of your advance. You go places, and traveling to places costs money and time. I traveled extensively around the world to research this. So I went to Atchison during the pandemic. I went to Newfoundland. You start to connect the dots,” she said.

“I think my husband’s really pissed off about that, to be honest (laughs), but I didn’t want any saying, ‘Oh, she’s making this up.’”