Eighty-eight years have passed since Amelia Earhart vanished into legend, her silver Lockheed Electra disappearing somewhere over the Pacific, her navigator Fred Noonan by her side. The 24th of this month would have been the famed aviatrix’s 128th birthday. And yet, much of what we remember about her has more to do with how she went missing than who she really was.

Knowledge of Earhart often begins and ends with the standard facts — she broke barriers in aviation and died attempting to become the first woman to pilot a flight around the world. Over time, her lore has grown, the gaps filled with fantastical stories of the Bermuda Triangle, the lost city of Atlantis, secret spy missions, even photographs claiming to show her alive on remote islands.

Like so many folk heroes, Earhart’s story draws as much from mythology as from fact. Yet behind the disappearance — and the speculation that followed — was a woman whose real life has often been eclipsed by the mystery she left behind.

Now, a new biography sets out to recover that woman.

“The Aviator and the Showman” by bestselling author, journalist, and documentarian Laurie Gwen Shapiro offers a more intimate and definitive portrait of Earhart’s life. Drawing on newly uncovered archives and years of meticulous research, Shapiro presents Earhart as more than a legend, revealing a layered woman navigating purpose, partnership, and public perception alongside her husband and manager, George Palmer Putnam.

It’s the kind of story that asks a lot of a writer, one that requires the ability to see what others have missed. She does just that.

I first met Shapiro in graduate school at NYU, when she was deep in the final stretch of writing the book. When we spoke again for this piece, she looked just as I remembered: her thick, dark hair a little shorter but still prone to catching in her glasses, her rich New York accent as unmistakable as ever. She was bubbly and animated, just as she’d been when I took her feature writing class in the spring of 2023. Back then, she told us to “throw everything you know about writing away.” She was going to help us “tell stories.”

And she did.

Shapiro is a woman who lives stories. On any given day in New York City, you might find her walking through new neighborhoods or rediscovering the people and places she grew up with. Like many New Yorkers, she never learned to drive, preferring to find stories the old-fashioned way — by hitting the pavement. “I find that being a non-driver means I’m not in a hermetically sealed car,” she said. “I’m on transportation. I’m on trains, I’m on buses, I’m in cars. And I get people to talk.”

It’s not uncommon for her to pop into an art exhibition or settle into the best lounge she can find, coffee in hand. Her social media reads like an adventure journal, filled with profiles of Uber drivers, bookstore owners, and the strangers she befriends on planes or in the cities where she’s doing research.

Once, while in California for a conference, she visited Earhart’s former home and knocked, hoping someone might answer. When no one did, Shapiro left a galley of her book and a pleading note on the door. It paid off. The owner called her back and offered her a private tour.

For Shapiro, one story nearly always leads to another. It’s how she works. She’s a believer that everyone has something worth telling, and there’s no way she’s going to gatekeep that. It’s this instinct that led her to Earhart in the first place, though the path began with a different explorer entirely.

While researching her book “The Stowaway” — a true account of Billy Gawronski, a teenager who, in 1928, snuck aboard Richard Byrd’s expedition to Antarctica — Shapiro stumbled on an unexpected thread. Byrd’s publisher was George Putnam, the same Putnam who, not long after, would become the driving force behind Earhart’s public image. “And then as I really got into it,” Shapiro told me, “I was like, oh my god, he became her husband.”

But how do you add something new to a figure who’s already been culturally picked apart?

One thing to know about Shapiro, she won’t take on a project unless it adds something meaningful and is rooted entirely in fact. It’s a principle she holds above all else. She has no interest in recycling rumors about Earhart. What she wanted was to tell a story that reflected who Earhart was, not the character history turned her into.

So, she began with the standard records — the ones donated to Purdue University by the Putnam family, and to Harvard by Earhart’s sister. But those collections had been pored over for decades, and, having come from the families, were carefully curated to avoid anything unflattering. Yet, like any good researcher, Shapiro knew that the most revealing material often turns up in the most obscure places.

One of those places was the University of New Hampshire, buried in an archive left behind by an Earhart conspiracy theorist. Most of it, Shapiro said, was “cockamamie.” But amid the mess were letters from Hilton Railey, a friend of Putnam’s who had introduced him to Earhart and had been present for some of their most formative conversations.

Another lead brought her to an archive in a secret room in Maine. Shapiro won’t say who tipped her off or where exactly she went. She flew in, made her way into town, and walked a stretch on foot. She arrived covered in mosquito bites, but she got what she came for.

Then there was the bombshell. The tapes.

Deep in her research, Shapiro kept hearing whispers about recordings related to Earhart, supposedly en route to the Smithsonian. But with the museum shut down due to COVID, they hadn’t yet arrived. After a bit of digging, she tracked them to a research facility in Virginia. She made repeated trips just to introduce herself and press the staff to let her listen. Eventually, they did.

Shapiro listened to hundreds of hours of recordings made by Elgin Long, an air crash investigator determined to pinpoint where Earhart went down. Some of the tapes were so muddled she enlisted her musician husband to help clean up the audio. But there they were: interviews with family, friends, mechanics, and crew members, all offering insight into Earhart and Putnam. Those tapes eventually made their way to the Smithsonian, where they’re now part of its Amelia Earhart project and available for public listening.

This was only part of it. Shapiro also tracked down and interviewed relatives, researchers, and former biographers whose versions of the story had long been overlooked.

Those discoveries surface in “The Aviator and the Showman” in surprising and vivid ways. The book isn’t a dry biography or a rote retelling of history. It’s a narrative in full, one alive with character and tension. A story with stakes.

Its richness comes from Shapiro’s close study of Earhart and Putnam and their complicated relationship.

It might seem surprising to call Putnam a charlatan, but it fits. He wasn’t a side character — not in Earhart’s life, and not in this story. He may have genuinely loved her, but his devotion often bordered on obsession and a relentless drive to profit from her success. It’s a pattern Shapiro traces across his relationships with other women as well. “At first, Amelia was a shiny new object, and his wife, who was ten years older than Amelia, bored him,” Shapiro said.

Putnam was already married to the Crayola crayon heiress, Dorothy Binney, when he began pursuing Earhart. And even after they wed, he continued to take a 10 percent commission on everything she earned. For a man who wasn’t wealthy, though he worked hard to appear so, Earhart spelled opportunity.

A master of perception, he was skilled at crafting images that served him, especially when money was involved. The round-the-world flight that helped make Earhart a legend was over budget — a financial gamble Putnam helped orchestrate. And as Shapiro shows, his flair for spectacle didn’t stop there. Even after her disappearance, he embellished Earhart’s story and, at one point, faked his own kidnapping to drum up publicity for an upcoming book.

Earhart herself emerges as equally complex. She was an ardent feminist, pushing boundaries and advocating for women at a time when it was anything but popular. Before Putnam, she had been involved with a much older, wealthy man — whom Shapiro jokingly refers to as her “sugar daddy.” But her feminism wasn’t just a public principle. It shaped how she lived. Even after marrying Putnam, she insisted on separate bank accounts and maintained a fierce sense of independence.

At the time they met, Earhart was working as a social worker and flying when she could. She was content, but as Shapiro puts it, “she wanted to count.” She was also struggling financially, and more than one advisor, despite their misgivings, encouraged her to marry Putnam. A man who knew how to turn publicity into profit. It was something she neither liked nor excelled at. In an era when women pilots needed spectacle to stay airborne, he offered the infrastructure and visibility she lacked.

The book makes clear that Earhart wasn’t a master pilot. While she could certainly fly, she lacked key technical skills — including proficiency in Morse code — that may have contributed to her disappearance. As Shapiro notes, with constant touring, guest teaching, and the pressures of maintaining her public image, Earhart rarely had the opportunity to sharpen her skills. In truth, there were other women pilots far better prepared for the feat she set out to achieve.

Earhart wasn’t perfect. But for Shapiro, that’s precisely what makes her compelling. It’s what makes her real. “She was brave as hell,” she told me. “I don’t want you to confuse my narrative with someone who’s unimpressed with Amelia Earhart. But I’m scared for her a lot of the time that I’m working on the chapters. I’m like, ‘Oh no, Amelia.’”

And it’s worth asking, would we examine those flaws, or doubt her courage, quite so closely if she’d been a man?

Together, the couple was undoubtedly a force. Putnam’s shrewd instincts and Earhart’s unwavering belief that she could do anything were both their greatest strengths, and in many ways, contributed to her downfall. Without Putnam, we might not have the Earhart we remember. And without Earhart, the path for women in aviation and so many other fields might have looked very different. For Shapiro, that’s the point. At its core, the book is about ambition.

That ambition is something Shapiro deeply connected with. From a young age, she knew she wanted to be a writer. In her twenties, she found early success in chick lit. Her quirky, funny novel “The Unexpected Salami” was a hit, but she always carried the voice of her mentor, Frank McCourt — the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Angela’s Ashes” — in the back of her mind. “He said, ‘You have natural ability as a writer, and your problem is going to be that you can coast on that. The way you’re going to get better is by going deeper and harder.’”

After becoming a mother herself and caring for her ailing father, Shapiro decided to make a shift. She wanted to write what she loved to read, so she turned to narrative nonfiction. And she hasn’t looked back.

Like Earhart, Shapiro is navigating a world full of loud voices and strong opinions. A particularly juicy excerpt of the book recently ran in The New Yorker and was an instant success. But with that success came backlash. Some Earhart enthusiasts insisted she had gotten it wrong — claims Shapiro shrugs off. She’s unfazed, pointing to the depth of her research and saying, simply, that she has the “receipts” to back her up. Others went further, accusing her of tarnishing a feminist icon for daring to tell a more complicated story.

But it’s exactly that story that makes Earhart feel more alive. She stands as someone real and tangible, not a figure that exists only in folklore.

And it’s her humanness that leaves subtle marks on places like Colorado, where direct ties to Earhart are few but still surface in unique ways. Like the Amelia Earhart Memorial on County Road 6 South, in Alamosa. Where she reportedly landed in a meadow after getting caught in a storm during the Dust Bowl. According to the historical placard, local resident Lloyd Jones helped her find lodging, guarded her plane while she resupplied, and was even invited to autograph it.

Or the story of Earhart’s mother, Amy, who was supposedly the first woman to summit Pikes Peak — one of Colorado’s most famous 14ers.

There’s also the Pikes Peak Chapter of the Ninety-Nines, the women-only aviation group Earhart helped found alongside other pioneering women pilots. She later served as its first president. Today, the organization offers scholarships, mentorship, and professional support to women pilots around the world. The Pikes Peak Ninety-Nines, based in Colorado Springs, has about 44 active members and also serves the Pueblo area. Patsy Buchwald, a longstanding member of the group, told me they occasionally fly to Pueblo for what they jokingly call “the world’s most expensive hamburger.”

And then there’s Ann Frink, a Pueblo native and a member of the Pikes Peak Ninety-Nines. She was also one of the elite Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II. She and her husband owned the beloved Broadway Inn tavern for many years. Frink passed away in 1995, but her life, like Earhart’s, helped shape the path for generations of women in aviation.

These are the stories worth telling. Not tales about vanishing planes and figures in the mist, but about how Earhart lived. How she moved through the world. How she made her mark. Not just in the sky, but in the messy, stubborn, complicated, and sticky life we all have to navigate. It’s in the choices we make, and the mix of drive and dumb luck it takes to pull it all off.

That is what Shapiro has so masterfully done in this book.

But she’s not done, not by a long shot. While the tour for “The Aviator and the Showman” is taking off, her research for the next project is already underway. Recently she headed to London, chasing the story of another woman. Another myth. And another chance to set the record straight.

And if you’re left wondering whether Shapiro finally cracks the mystery of Earhart’s fate, well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

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