Amelia Mary Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas, in the home of her maternal grandparents, Alfred and Amelia Otis. She was the older of two daughters of Edwin Stanton Earhart, a railroad claims attorney whose work often kept the family moving, and Amy Otis Earhart, who came from a prominent local family that valued education. Much of Amelia’s early childhood was spent with her grandparents in Atchison while her parents lived elsewhere. She and her younger sister, Muriel, grew up with unusual freedom for girls of their time. Amelia climbed trees, hunted rats with a rifle, built a homemade roller coaster off a shed, and kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about women who succeeded in fields dominated by men.
The family moved frequently as Edwin’s career rose and faltered. They lived in Kansas City, Des Moines, St. Paul, and Chicago. At the Iowa State Fair around 1907 or 1908, ten-year-old Amelia saw her first airplane and found it unimpressive, a thing of rusty wire and wood. She later attended several schools and graduated from Hyde Park High School in Chicago in 1915. During World War I she left finishing school to work as a nurse’s aide at a military hospital in Toronto, where she watched planes and spoke with pilots. After the war she briefly studied pre-medicine at Columbia University before joining her parents in California.
On December 28, 1920, Amelia took a ten-minute passenger flight with barnstormer Frank Hawks. She later said that as soon as the plane left the ground she knew she had to fly. She began lessons on January 3, 1921, with Neta Snook, one of the few women instructors then working. Within months she bought a second-hand bright yellow Kinner Airster biplane she named The Canary. On October 22, 1922, she set an unofficial women’s altitude record of 14,000 feet. On May 15, 1923, she received her Fédération Aéronautique Internationale license, becoming the sixteenth woman in the world to hold one.
Family finances forced her to sell the plane. After her parents divorced she moved east and worked as a social worker at Denison House in Boston while flying in air shows. In 1928 publisher George Palmer Putnam selected her to be a passenger on a transatlantic flight in the Fokker F.VII Friendship, piloted by Wilmer Stultz and Louis Gordon. The plane left Trepassey, Newfoundland, on June 17 and landed in Wales about twenty-one hours later. Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, though she did not fly the plane. The publicity made her an international figure. She wrote books, lectured widely, and used her fame to promote aviation and opportunities for women.
On February 7, 1931, she married Putnam. She continued to set records. On May 20–21, 1932, five years after Charles Lindbergh’s flight, she flew a Lockheed Vega solo from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, to Culmore, Northern Ireland, in fourteen hours and fifty-six minutes. She was the first woman and the second person to fly the Atlantic alone. Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross, the first given to a woman. Later that year she made the first solo nonstop flight by a woman across the United States, from Los Angeles to Newark, in nineteen hours and five minutes. She helped found the Ninety-Nines, an organization of women pilots, and served as its first president. In 1935 she became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to Oakland, making her the first to fly alone across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. She also flew solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City and from Mexico City to Newark.
Purdue University hired her as an aviation adviser and career counselor for women and purchased a Lockheed Electra 10E that she called her flying laboratory. In 1937 she set out to become the first woman to fly around the world along a route near the equator. An east-to-west attempt in March ended when the Electra crashed on takeoff in Honolulu. After repairs she and navigator Fred Noonan departed Miami on June 1, flying east. They completed most of the 29,000-mile journey, stopping at points in South America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.
On July 2, 1937, they left Lae, New Guinea, for Howland Island, a tiny speck 2,556 miles away in the central Pacific. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca waited there to guide them by radio. Earhart’s last confirmed transmission, at 8:43 a.m. local time, reported they were flying the 157–337 line and running north and south. They never arrived. An intensive search covering some 250,000 square miles and costing about four million dollars found nothing. Earhart was declared legally dead on January 5, 1939.
The most widely accepted explanation is that the Electra ran out of fuel and ditched in deep water near Howland Island. Other theories hold that the pair reached Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro) and died as castaways, or that they were captured by Japanese forces. No wreckage or remains have been conclusively identified.
Earhart’s brief career changed public ideas about what women could do in the air and on the ground. She argued that flying required intelligence, coordination, and willpower rather than gender. Streets, schools, airports, and a lighthouse on Howland Island carry her name. Nearly ninety years after she vanished, her records, her books, and the unanswered question of her last flight keep her among the best-known figures in aviation history.