Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Anne Morrow Lindbergh has led a storybook life, in both its achievements and its tragedies. The daughter of a banker and diplomat, the wife of Charles Lindbergh, and a pioneer aviatrix, she also wrote one of the most beloved works of our century, A Gift from the Sea. This compelling biography explores the career of this remarkable woman, beginning with her sheltered and privileged upbringing and her marriage to the foremost hero of her generation and continuing on to the. trauma of their baby's kidnapping, the ensuing years of self-imposed exile, the bitter controversy concerning Lindbergh's political isolationism, and the postwar years, which saw the publication of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's most enduring works. Dorothy Herrmann offers a sensitive, probing life that is brimful with prominent figures of the century: Amelia Earhart, Franklin Roosevelt, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Frida Kahlo, Joseph Kennedy, Hermann Goring, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West, and Charles Lindbergh, the brilliant, troubled young man who was catapulted to fame in 1927 by his solo flight across the Atlantic. Throughout we watch Anne Morrow Lindbergh's struggle to find her own identity and then to balance the demands of being a wife, a mother, and an artist amid the contending pressures of family and fame. In depicting the excitement, tragedy, and ultimate triumph of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, this biography adds a significant. new chapter to the history of women in the twentieth century.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.