Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In 1930 Anne Morrow Lindbergh became the first woman in the United States to earn a glider pilot's licence. Born in Englewood, New Jersey in 1906 to the banker and diplomat Dwight Morrow, she graduated from Smith College in 1928, married Charles Lindbergh the next year, and spent the 1930s as his radio operator and co-pilot on survey flights that mapped air routes over the Arctic, the Atlantic and Africa. The Hubbard Medal followed in 1934. Two early books, North to the Orient and Listen! The Wind, came out of those journeys. Their first child was taken from the family house in 1932 and later found dead, after which they left for Europe. Her 1940 pamphlet The Wave of the Future, arguing against American entry into the war, drew heavy criticism that followed her for decades. Gift From The Sea, written on holidays at Captiva Island in Florida and published by Pantheon in 1955, reads shells picked up on the beach as figures for the stages of a woman's life and makes a case for solitude. It led the American nonfiction lists that year. She died in Vermont in 2001, aged 94.