American aviator pioneer and author, an historic adventurer in her 16-year-career. Called “Lady Lindy”, she received the distinguished Flying Cross and her jaunty, daredevil courageous ways captured the public’s imagination. She was the first woman to obtain an aviator’s license, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1932 and the first woman to fly across the U.S. and back by Autogiro. She set many speed and distance records including reaching 14,000 ft. altitude before her around-the-world flight in 1937 when she mysteriously disappeared over the Pacific, with no trace of her plane ever being found after she lost radio contact.
Earhart was a nurse, author, social worker and fashion designer. She spent her first 13 years living with strict maternal grandparents. The family included an alcoholic father, a repressed mother and a younger sister. Earhart was a natural leader in childhood games and activities, and she was known to keep her own counsel. She finished high school in Chicago where her dad finally abandoned his family. Her parents divorced in 1924. With the help of her mom’s family, she entered a Philadelphia finishing school, but soon dropped out to begin a ten-year search for a path of her own. She had volunteered to be a war nurse in Toronto, and in preparation, spent a year as a pre-med student at Columbia. From the time she made her first flight with a barnstormer in 1920, she was captivated. She dropped out of Columbia to work in California where she could take lessons and pawned everything she owned to buy an airplane. In California she joined her reunited parents until she moved to Massachusetts at 29, where she began work at Denison House, a settlement house providing support for poor families: There, she taught children and organized community activities.
Next to flying, she had a great passion for books, and was an avid reader, feminist and wrote poetry. She organized a women’s pilot association, taught at Purdue, championed social work, air safety and equality for women, and was in demand as a speaker. She wrote several books and many articles. She is the author of two books, “The Fun of it,” published in 1932 and “Last Flight,” based on some of her flight dispatches and passages, published in 1937 after her disappearance.
In 1931, Earhart married George Palmer Putnam, her publisher, a promoter, writer and former newspaperman, who guided the publicity surrounding her.
On 2 July 1937, she set out with co-pilot Fred Noonan on an around-the-world flight attempting to circumnavigate the globe along the Equator in a state-of-the-art Lockheed Electra. She and Noonan were on their way from New Guinea to a scheduled stopover on a tiny Pacific atoll of Howland Island. The last radio contact was at 8:55 A.M. local time on 2 July 1937. Theories have abounded since then regarding her disappearance, including one that she was a spy whose plane was shot down. Nothing as yet has been firmly substantiated.
An article in The London Sunday Times on 15 July 2001 reported that a satellite photo of tiny Nokumaroro Island in the Pacific shows rusting metal in a coral reef offshore where fishermen are said to have found the wreckage of an airplane.
Link to Wikipedia biography