Amelia Earhart Wasn't Who You Think She Was | Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Author of The Aviator and the Showman | Ep. 034

Everyone thinks they know the Amelia Earhart story.. until you actually check the archive. Laurie Gwen Shapiro is a journalist for the New York Times and The Atlantic, and she just spent five years going where no Earhart biographer had gone before. What she found isn't the flawless children's-book icon. Earhart was a woman who became famous in 1928 mostly for sitting in the back of a plane. She was cast for her look, not her flying, by a publicist named George Putnam who would later marry her. It's a marriage built on ghostwritten books, sabotaged rivals, and a courtship Shapiro calls "love bombing." It's the real, unglamorous math behind the 1937 disappearance: a stretched budget, a dropped antenna, an alcoholic navigator hired because he was cheap, and a woman who was sick, exhausted, and out of fuel. Shapiro's new book is The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon — a New Yorker Best Book of 2025. We sat down with her in our Bozeman studio to talk about the archive, the marriage, and why the real Amelia Earhart is more interesting than the myth.   Laurie Gwen Shapiro Website Amelia Earhart Project Recordings