Laurie Gwen Shapiro
Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marking of an American Icon
Amelia Earhart did not become Amelia Earhart by accident. In this talk, Laurie Gwen Shapiro shares the story behind The Aviator and the Showman, her new biography of Earhart and publisher-promoter George Palmer Putnam, tracing how a record-setting pilot, a gifted publicist, and a hungry American media culture together created one of the 20th century’s most enduring legends. Drawing on deep archival research, Shapiro looks past the familiar disappearance story to explore Earhart’s ambition, marriage, fame, and the machinery that turned a complicated woman into an icon.
Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York, The Daily Beast, Slate, and others. Shapiro is the 2021 winner of the Damn History Article Award for her New Yorker piece “The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes” and a gold medallion winner in the People Profiles category for the Silurians Press Club’s seventy-seventh annual Excellence in Journalism Awards. She is the author of The Stowaway, a bestseller and an Indie Next selection. She is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in the graduate program.
