Author Presents New Biography The Aviator and the Showman at the Harrison Public Library
She crossed the Atlantic alone, broke every record they set for her, and then vanished without a trace. Before all that, she was your neighbor.
Drive down Locust Avenue and you will pass a street called Amelia Earhart Lane. Most people don’t slow down. They should.
Amelia Earhart – aviator, record-breaker, the most photographed woman of her era – lived in Harrison. Not visited. Not passed through. Lived here, on an estate along Locust Avenue, in the years when she was becoming the most famous woman in the world.
There is a monument to her at Station Park. It was dedicated in 1932, the year she became the first woman – and only the second person ever – to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. Here is the detail that stops people cold: it is the only monument ever made in her honor during her lifetime. The only one. It is in Harrison.
If your life contains sex, violent death, and mystery, people will always be interested. As Laurie Gwen Shapiro – author of the new biography The Aviator and the Showman – puts it: if it has two of those things, you’re tabloid fodder. If it has all three, you’re Amelia Earhart.
She set altitude records, speed records, distance records. She flew alone across the Pacific. She became the face of a new kind of American woman — fearless, self-invented, unwilling to be contained.
Shapiro’s book traces the partnership between Earhart and Putnam – the aviator and the showman – and the complicated machinery of fame that made Amelia a legend. It is a biography, but it reads like a thriller about ambition, image, and the price of becoming an icon.
Shapiro will be at the Harrison Public Library on Monday, July 28 at 7 p.m. for a free public program as the Library’s 2026 Summer Reading Ambassador. The event is part of HPL’s Summer Reading Program, themed “Unearth a Story” — and for Harrison, this summer, the story has been here all along.
Registration is at www.harrisonpl.org. And when you drive down Locust Avenue on your way home, slow down at Amelia Earhart Lane. Now you know what it means.
Harrison Public Library Summer Reading Program: June 1–August 7 www.harrisonpl.org
Photo credit: Westchester County Archive