Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight

That “typically feminine” bit of vanity about her age was atypical of a woman who, from childhood, had refused to let her sex either limit or define her. Even in her late thirties, Earhart looked like an adolescent boy who had chopped off his own hair. She was lanky and nonchalant, with no hips or breasts—no visible womanliness—to speak of. One learns from Butler that she flew wearing men’s underpants .

Amelia was born in 1897, in a Gothic mansion on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, in Atchison, Kansas. Her mother, Amy, was the daughter of Alfred Otis, a wealthy lawyer, and of Millie Harres, who had grown up in Philadelphia society and never quite overcame her nostalgia for it. Amy defied her father to marry Edwin Earhart, the son of a destitute Lutheran minister, who had worked his way through law school but settled for a lazy practice as what one in-law called “a claims chaser.

In her time off, Amelia visited a military airfield. “They were terribly young, those air men, young and eager,” she wrote in “20 Hrs. 40 Min.” “Aviation . . . inevitably attracted the romanticists.” Whether or not she saw herself as one of them, she would come to do so. She called herself “a hobo of the air,” and described her early flights as “vagabonding.

Among the admirers of her bravado was the Earharts’ new boarder. Sam Chapman, an engineer from Marblehead, Massachusetts, was five years Amelia’s senior. They played tennis and discussed philosophy, Butler writes, and he shared her progressive ideals, including, apparently, her notions of equality between a husband and a wife. Before he left California, in 1924, he asked her to marry him, and she accepted.

It is hard to know whether, or how long, Earhart would have stayed in social work if Railey hadn’t offered her a shot at glory. She could, for a while, throw herself into a high-minded endeavor, but she lacked the discipline to see it through. She dallied with Chapman for six years, breaking their engagement when she became famous. She warned Putnam that she was incapable of fidelity, and she apparently made good on her threat.

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