Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (born June 22, 1906, Englewood, New Jersey, U.S.—died February 7, 2001, Passumpsic, Vermont) was an American author and airplane pilot primarily known as the wife of aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh and as the grief-stricken mother in one of the most famous child kidnapping cases in history. For her work as a copilot and radio operator on exploratory plane trips spanning 64,000 km (40,000 miles) and five continents, Lindbergh became the first woman to receive the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographic Society (1934). Her books about her travels were well received, but it was her collections of diaries and letters that sparked immense interest from a public eager for a glimpse into one of the United States’ most famous families.

In 1927, while on Christmas break from Smith College, Anne Spencer Morrow met Charles Lindbergh—considered to be one of the most eligible bachelors of the day after his solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean—at an embassy reception in Mexico, where her father was serving as the U.S. ambassador. She received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1928 and married Lindbergh the following year.

In 1930 Anne Morrow Lindbergh became the first American woman to get a glider pilot’s license, and she and her husband spent much of their early married life charting potential air routes for commercial airlines. Details of their travels are covered in her books North to the Orient (1935), about flying to Japan and China over the Arctic, and Listen! The Wind (1938), about a difficult flight across the Atlantic from Africa to South America.

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In March 1932 the Lindberghs’ 20-month-old son, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., was kidnapped from their home near Hopewell, New Jersey, and murdered. The crime received constant media coverage from the moment it happened until April 1936, when Bruno Richard Hauptmann was executed after being convicted of the kidnap-murder. Safety concerns and distaste for publicity led the Lindberghs to take refuge in Europe. The couple had five other children between 1932 and 1947.

The family returned to the United States in 1939, but the couple’s isolationist stance regarding World War II, particularly Charles Lindbergh’s work with the America First Committee and his acceptance of a medal from Nazi official Hermann Göring, brought the Lindberghs public criticism. In Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s short book The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith (1940), in which she discussed the war, she held the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy to be a new historical development like the French Revolution and argued that, by staying out of the war, the U.S. would be able to nudge Germany and Italy in a more positive direction. U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes called the book “the bible of every American Nazi, Fascist, Bundist, and appeaser,” and Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his third inaugural address, alluded to Lindbergh’s book when he said, “There are men who believe that…tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future—and that freedom is an ebbing tide.” The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 led the Lindberghs to reconsider their position and perform various wartime services for the U.S.

Following World War II the Lindberghs lived quietly in Connecticut and then in Hawaii. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s writings did much to rehabilitate their reputations. She had published her first novel, The Steep Ascent, about a dangerous airplane journey over the Alps, in 1944. Her most popular work, however, is the autobiographical essay collection Gift from the Sea (1955), in which she used seashells she found during a vacation on Captiva Island, Florida, as a springboard for meditations on marriage, motherhood, and the complexity of modern life. Other writings include The Unicorn, and Other Poems, 1935–1955 (1956); the novel Dearly Beloved: A Theme and Variations (1962), in which nine guests at a wedding consider the nature of marriage; and the nonfiction book Earth Shine (1969), about the first Moon-orbiting flight, by Apollo 8.

Lindbergh did not write a typical autobiography but instead released collections of her letters and diaries. The first such collection is Bring Me a Unicorn (1972), which covers her life from 1922 to 1928. She followed with Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead (1973), which describes circumstances related to the kidnapping. Three further volumes, Locked Rooms and Open Doors (1974), The Flower and the Nettle (1976), and War Within and Without (1980), recount her life from 1933 to 1939. A final volume, Against Wind and Tide (2012), dealing with the years from 1947 to 1986, was published posthumously.

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Lindbergh received numerous honours later in her life, including induction into the National Aviation Hall of Fame (1979) and the National Women’s Hall of Fame (1996).