Soon after learning to fly, Amelia Earhart broke the women’s world record for high-altitude flying at 14,000 feet. Her fearless and focused demeanor helped her quickly rise to one of the world’s top female pilots. Unknown to many, she was also a writer and contributed essays to several publications of the day. She also wrote her first book, entitled 20 Hrs. 40 Min., which depicted her adventures as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

In the autobiography and memoir of Amelia Earhart, also published by Putnam, called The Fun of It, she details her life as a pilot and what she believes the role of women are in modern flight. Another book of Earhart’s published posthumously called Last Flight detailed her journal entries in her attempt to circumnavigate the globe. It was in this last flight that she disappeared without a trace somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

She was a member of the National Aeronautic Association and was heralded as the best female pilot in the United States. But, none of this mattered on the day of her disappearance on July 2, 1937 when she was scheduled to make radio contact and land on Howland Island, a small island used as a military landing strip.

Even with one of the world’s top navigators named Fred Noonan beside her, their Pacific flight route course was not exact. Earhart and Noonan believed they were right above Howard Island, but were actually off by a few nautical miles. In the ensuing hours, Amelia circled about and looked for the landing strip, but to no avail. Believing her plane went down, the American government spent millions of dollars in an attempt to rescue their beloved Amelia and her navigator Noonan.

However, many theories, legends, and other accounts detail her disappearance differently. Evidence seems to suggest that she actually continued for an additional two hours in an attempt to reach Gardner Island. While many a biography of Amelia Earhart have been written, none can quite ascertain what really happened on the day of her disappearance. Some groups theorize she landed safely and wanted to give up flying, so she changed her name and lived out the rest of her life in peace. Others suggest she was abducted by the Japanese or even by Aliens who wanted to alter history for some reason. No matter what happened, her name lives on as an example to pilots and women everywhere about how far inspiration and believing in oneself can take you.

• Howard Hughes
• Charles Lindbergh
• Anita Snook
• Amy Guest
• George P. Putnam
• Fred Noonan
• Herbert Hoover