Shapiro’s windy account of Earhart’s early life includes a few brand-new details, particularly regarding the aviator’s connection with an early benefactor (Shapiro calls him Earhart’s “sugar father”) in The golden state: a 63 -year-old billboard mogul called Thomas Humphrey Bennett Varney. Varney intended to wed her, but she wound up accepting the proposition of a young chemical designer from Boston, Samuel Chapman. “Amelia could have had an extremely various life,” stated Shapiro. “She can have gone to Marblehead, Massachusetts, where [Chapman] had a home, and become part of the luxury yacht set and she still would certainly have had an intriguing life. But I do not think that was the life Amelia Earhart wanted, also if that suggested she had a shorter life.”
Shapiro does not overlook Putnam’s tale, describing him as the “PT Barnum of publishing.” The family members posting business, G.P. Putnam and Sons, was founded in 1838 by his grandpa, and by the late 1920 s, the enthusiastic young George was amongst several feasible followers jockeying for setting to change his uncle, George Place Putnam. He had his own ambitions, established to bring what he deemed a stodgy firm totally into the 20 th century.
Putnam released Charles Lindbergh ‘s hit narrative, We , in 1927 and adhered to that early success with a collection of rather lurid experience memoirs chronicling the ventures of “boy travelers.” The children didn’t always endure their experiences, with one perishing from a serpent bite and another drowning in a Bolivian flood. But the books were business successes, so Putnam kept cranking them out.
After Lindbergh’s historical crossing, Putnam was eager to take advantage of the public’s crave aviation stories. It would not be specifically relevant to have one more male make the very same flight. Yet a woman? Putnam liked that idea, and a well-off benefactor, steel heiress Amy Phipps Guest, gave financial backing for the task– actually even more of an attention stunt, given that Putnam’s plan, as constantly, was to release a brilliant memoir of the journey. Throughout allure Age, papers routinely spent for exclusive rights to these type of tales for radiant coverage, per Shapiro. In this instance, The New York Times did not originally intend to fund a female for a trans-Atlantic trip, but Putnam’s connections won them over.