The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart and George Putnam with Laurie Gwen Shapiro

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Award-winning author and journalist Laurie Gwen Shapiro joins the Adventurers’ Club for a presentation on her acclaimed new book, The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon. The evening explores the riveting and cinematic story of the partnership between Amelia Earhart and George Putnam that would change the world forever. In 1928, a young social worker and hobby pilot named Amelia Earhart arrived in the office of George Putnam, heir to the Putnam & Sons throne and a hitmaker searching for the right woman for a secret flying mission across the Atlantic. A partnership – professional and soon otherwise – was born.
Drawing from a trove of new sources, including undiscovered audio interviews from those closest to Earhart, Shapiro unveils the untold story of Amelia’s decade-long marriage to Putnam and the pivotal role it played in shaping her enduring legacy. Despite her outwardly modest image, Earhart emerges as fiercely driven, impossibly brave, and deeply ambitious, while Putnam, the so-called “PT Barnum of publishing,” relentlessly pushed spectacle and publicity in the service of building an icon.

Their ahead-of-its-time partnership supported Earhart’s grand ambitions, but also pressed her toward increasingly treacherous stunts to promote her books, influencing a certain recklessness up to and including her final flight. The result is a gripping and passionate tale of adventure, colorful characters, and hubris, painting a vivid portrait of a marriage that shaped the trajectory of an iconic life.
Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, New York, The Daily Beast, Slate, and other publications. She is the author of The Stowaway(Simon & Schuster, 2018), a bestseller and Indie Next selection, and The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon(Viking, 2025), named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Amazon, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Post, and HISTORY.com. Her New Yorkerpiece “The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes” won the Damn History Award in 2021. She also received the gold medallion in People Profiles from the Silurian Press Club for her New York Times profile of World War II pilot Si Spiegel. She is an adjunct professor in the graduate program at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, where she teaches feature writing.  Her next book just sold to Viking, on Albert Einstein’s years in America, including Los Angeles.

This program was organized by Steve Elkins #1209.