Here is a brief excerpt from a “classic” article by Judith Thurman for The New Yorker (September 14, 2009 Issue). To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

* * *

The aviation pioneer was many things before—and after—her career as a pilot was cut short when her plane disappeared in the Pacific.

For my tenth birthday, I got the present of my dreams: a piece of Amelia Earhart luggage. It was a small overnight case made of aluminum, with rounded corners, and covered in blue vinyl. Between the latches was a little plaque with an ersatz, feminine signature. (Earhart’s actual signature was loopy and uneven, with a runic-looking “A.”) I had nowhere to go, so I kept the case under my bed and filled it with dolls’ clothes—a use, I suspect, of which Earhart would have disapproved. Play that prepared a young girl for domesticity was anathema to her ideals. When she lectured at colleges—as she did frequently, to promote careers for women, especially in aviation—she urged the coeds to focus on majors dominated by men, like engineering, and to postpone marriage until they had got a degree. On Earhart’s own wedding day, in 1931, the thirty-three-year-old bride handed her forty-three-year-old groom, George Palmer Putnam, a remarkable letter, which read:

“You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means so much to me. . . . In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. . . . I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all the confinements of even an attractive cage.”

The place where Earhart went to be herself was the cockpit of a plane, and that may have been the place where she died. On July 2, 1937, she became the world’s most famous missing person when her twin-engine Lockheed Electra disappeared in the vicinity of Howland Island, a speck in the Pacific about midway between Australia and Hawaii, where the Department of the Interior had built her a landing strip. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were attempting to circumnavigate the equator, a feat for the record books, although pilots before them (all male) had rounded the globe at least six times by shorter routes, and commercial transpacific air service had recently been inaugurated. Critics accused Earhart posthumously of embarking on a capricious joyride that ultimately cost taxpayers millions of dollars, the estimated tab for a huge rescue mission authorized by President Roosevelt, Earhart’s fan and friend. Even some of her staunchest admirers disapproved of the last flight. Earhart’s biographer Susan Butler quotes one of them, Captain Hilton Railey, who had helped to launch her career. She was, he wrote, “caught up in the hero racket.”

Earhart, however, was a heroic figure to millions of her contemporaries, and she still counts as one. She achieved fame dramatically, in 1928, as the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane, the Friendship, albeit only as a passenger. Railey had recruited her on behalf of Mrs. Frederick E. Guest, née Amy Phipps, a steel heiress and sportswoman who was underwriting the expedition. She had planned to play the starring role herself, until her husband, a former British Cabinet minister, expressed his alarm (three women fliers, including a princess, had recently perished in crashes). Railey was commissioned to find a substitute, and Guest stipulated that, ideally, she should be an aviator but, more important, “the right sort of girl.” (The wrong sort of girl was her rival in the race to Europe, Mabel Boll, a flamboyant former actress who was known as the Queen of Diamonds. As Guest later put it to her daughter, “It just wouldn’t do.”)

Wilmer (Bill) Stultz, the pilot of the Friendship, who had defected from the Boll party, and Louis (Slim) Gordon, the mechanic, had done the actual flying, and Earhart tried to remind a besotted press and ecstatic crowds hailing her as “Lady Lindy” that she had really been just “a sack of potatoes.” In 1932, however, she legitimatized the title by flying the Atlantic on her own, becoming the first woman and the second person, five years after Charles Lindbergh, to do so. (Congress awarded her honorary Major Wings that she wore with her pearls.) In 1935, she was the first pilot to solo across the Pacific—from Honolulu to Oakland—and to solo non-stop from Los Angeles to Mexico.

* * *

Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987 and became a staff writer in 2000. She writes about books, culture, and fashion. Her story on Yves Saint Laurent was chosen for “The Best American Essays of 2003.” In addition to articles about the great couturiers of the twentieth century (Chanel, Balenciaga, Schiaparelli), and the avant-gardists of this one (Rei Kawakubo, Isabel Toledo, Alexander McQueen), Thurman has written about performance art (Marina Abramović) and photography (Diane Arbus). Much of her work focusses on the lives of writers, from Flaubert and Margaret Fuller to the graphic memoirist Alison Bechdel. “First Impressions,” her 2008 reportage about the world’s oldest art—the Paleolithic paintings at the Chauvet cave, in southern France—was the inspiration for Werner Herzog’s film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

She is the author of “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,” which won the 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction and served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s movie “Out of Africa,” and “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and the Salon Book Award for biography. A collection of her New Yorker essays, “Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire,” was published in 2007. She has received the Mary McCarthy Award for lifetime achievement; the Rungstedlund Prize, from the Royal Danish Academy; and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is also a chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. A second volume of her New Yorker essays, “A Left-Handed Woman,” is forthcoming in 2022.