[AE and Fred Noonan on the last flight]
Author’s Note
There are many women who wish they were men; few men who wish they were women. Amelia Earhart did not want to be a man—she was the essence of femininity; but she did want to do many of the things men can do—and a few of the things men cannot do. For her, the greatest challenge in the world of men was the ability to fly, and this ability in AE (as she liked to be called) was the flowering of an attitude that took root early in her childhood. Having learned to fly, she was not content, however, simply to be able to fly; she wanted to be “the first to do,” to set new records, to prove that women could try things as men have tried.
Amelia Earhart was one of America’s great heroines; her life was in many ways unique. She was one of a kind, and the fabric of her life was woven of strands that are rarely produced: she had an insatiable curiosity about everything in life—ideas, books, people, places, mechanical things; she loved all kinds of sports and games, especially those “only for boys”; she fidgeted with an implacable unrest to experiment, to try new things; she teemed with a zest for living, paradoxically entwined with a gnawing and pervasive longing to be alone; and, finally, she brooded with a fatalism toward death, which she met with a tremendous will to live.
Of such strands was the fabric made that produced the public figure acclaimed throughout the world; the woman who succeeded in such incredible achievements as flying solo across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and then resented the publicity which they brought; the girl who simply wanted to do because she wanted to demonstrate the equality of her sex with that of the opposite in all fields of constructive endeavor. But what she wanted to do could not be done simply, and in that complexity lies the mystery of a human soul and the fascination of a woman who dared the dominion of that soul.
My research into the life of Amelia Earhart led me into a study of many lives and of the period in which they were lived; it has also led me thousands of miles across these United States and occasioned from me hundreds of letters of inquiry. I pored over books, magazines, and newspapers, and from them gained the basic story of the woman flier’s life; but it was the people I interviewed and wrote to, who answered my many and persistent questions and provided me with their private letters, pictures, and other memorabilia, who in the last analysis made the writing of this biography an enjoyable undertaking.
My purpose in choosing the narrative-dramatic-expository technique of the modern biographer in telling my story was a simple one: while I used many of the resources of the objective scholar in gathering and marshaling my materials and in establishing their accuracy, I tried to show the novelist’s interest in background influences, in hidden motives, in the complex nature of character. In short, I wanted to translate an intriguing woman out of aviation terms into human terms.
Paul L. Briand, Jr.
Captain, USAF
United States Air Force Academy
Colorado