New Amelia Earhart bio delves into her unconventional marriage

"Famed aviator Amelia Earhart has captured our imaginations for nearly a century, particularly her disappearance in 1937 during an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. Earhart was a complicated woman, highly skilled as a pilot yet with a tendency toward carelessness. And her marriage to a flamboyant publisher with a flair for marketing may have encouraged that carelessness and contributed to her untimely demise,"

"The fact that Earhart started out as Putnam's mistress contradicted Shapiro's early squeaky-clean image of Earhart and drove her to delve deeper into the life of this extraordinary woman. "I was less interested in how she died than how she lived," said Shapiro. "Was she a good pilot? Was she a good, kind person? Was this a real marriage? The mystery of Amelia Earhart is not how she died, but how she lived.""

Amelia Earhart became a cultural icon largely because of her pioneering flights and her 1937 disappearance during a global circumnavigation attempt. Earhart combined high piloting skill with a tendency toward carelessness. Her marriage to publisher George Palmer Putnam introduced aggressive marketing and publicity that may have encouraged risky behavior and influenced public perception. Newly available archival material, including roughly 200 hours of recordings, sheds fresh light on private and professional dynamics. Earhart's early relationship with Putnam began as an affair, complicating her public image and prompting renewed examination of how she lived as well as how she flew.

Read at Ars Technica