East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart
By Susan Butler
Addison-Wesley, 489 pages, $27.50
Even before her mysterious disappearance in 1937, Amelia Earhart had seized the public’s imagination. She became internationally famous in 1928 as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, even though she was just a passenger. She was an instant celebrity: Her unvarnished good looks soon adorned magazine covers, as well as advertisements for products from cigarettes to sports clothes. As the nation slid into the Depression, Earhart became America’s golden girl, a brilliant reminder of potential and possibility.
Yet for all the adoration she received in life, her death propelled her from the common embrace into lofty myth. Three weeks shy of her 40th birthday, while attempting to fly her twin-engine Lockheed Electra around the world, Earhart and her co-pilot, Fred J. Noonan, vanished over the South Pacific. Neither the bodies nor the plane was ever found, fueling endless speculation about what had happened. There are the familiar refrains of the 60 years since her death: She was shot down by the Japanese, or her journey was merely a cover for a secret spy mission.
Lost among such conspiracy theories and beliefs is the woman who lived to soar among the clouds. Her sudden death, with its unanswered questions, cast a shadow over the interrupted life of a remarkable woman. It also prompted a seemingly endless array of Earhart biographies.
The latest is “East to the Dawn,” Susan Butler’s adulatory examination of Earhart’s life and career. This expansive biography unearths new material on Earhart, including a diary from Earhart’s cousin Lucy Challiss, an unpublished biography by journalist Janet Mabie and letters sent to a woman friend by Noonan.
In 1927, when Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, George Palmer Putnam, a brilliant New York publisher, orchestrated much of Lindbergh’s post-flight publicity. Sensing the public’s thirst for more, Putnam began his search for a woman who could make the flight, even if she couldn’t fill the pilot’s role. He found Earhart, then a social worker in Boston.
Butler spends a great deal of time dissecting Earhart’s marriage to Putnam, a union that always seemed more about commercial opportunities than about companionship. Putnam would work tirelessly promoting Earhart, always finding ways to keep the shine on her star. Butler, who spent 10 years writing this biography, is almost as zealous.
Butler, in fact, is almost swamped by her adoration of Earhart, who (according to Butler) “did everything better than everybody else.” That’s quite an overstatement given Earhart’s sometimes careless preparation for flights, including the one that would ultimately cost her her life. While Butler’s slavish attention to the minutiae of Earhart’s flights can be textbook-dry, other minor details are kicky, such as the will Earhart composed shortly before her history-making trans-Atlantic flight, which listed among her debts a $140 fur coat purchased at Filene’s.
Rich with detail, “East to the Dawn” is an important book despite its flaws–certainly the most comprehensive Earhart biography in recent years.
