Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (June 22, 1906, Englewood, New Jersey – February 7, 2001, Passumpsic, Vermont) was a pioneering American aviator, author, and the spouse of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Morrow_Lindbergh

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (née Anne Spencer Morrow; June 22, 1906 – February 7, 2001) was an American author, aviator, and the spouse of fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh. She was an acclaimed author whose books and articles spanned the genres of poetry to non-fiction, touching upon topics as diverse as youth and age; love and marriage; peace, solitude and contentment, as well as the role of women in the 20th Century. Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea stands as a seminal work in feminist literature.

Early life

Anne Spencer Morrow was born on June 22, 1906 in Englewood, New Jersey. Her father was Dwight W. Morrow, a partner in J.P. Morgan & Co., who became United States Ambassador to Mexico and United States Senator from New Jersey. Her mother was Elizabeth Reeve Cutter Morrow, a poet and teacher, who was active in women's education, and served as acting president of her alma mater Smith College. Anne was the second of four children; her siblings were Elisabeth Reeve, Dwight, Jr., and Constance. The children were raised in a household that fostered achievement. Every night, Anne's mother would read to her children for an hour. The children quickly learned to read and write, began reading to themselves, and writing poetry and diaries. Anne would later benefit from this routine, eventually publishing her later diaries to critical acclaim.

After graduating from The Chapin School in New York City in 1924, Anne attended Smith College, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1928. She received the Elizabeth Montagu Prize for her essay on women of the eighteenth century and Madame d'Houdetot, and the Mary Augusta Jordan Literary Prize for her fictional piece entitled "Lida Was Beautiful".

Marriage and family

Anne and Charles Lindbergh met on December 21, 1927 in Mexico City. Dwight Morrow—Lindbergh's financial adviser at J.P. Morgan and Co.—invited Lindbergh to Mexico in order to advance good relations between that country and the United States. At the time, Anne Morrow was a shy 21-year-old senior at Smith College. Charles Lindbergh was a courageous aviator whose solo flight across the Atlantic made him a hero of mythic proportions and the most famous man in the world. But the sight of the boyish aviator, who was staying with the Morrows, tugged at Anne's heartstrings. She would later write in her diary:

“He is taller than anyone else—you see his head in a moving crowd and you notice his glance, where it turns, as though it were keener, clearer, and brighter than anyone else's, lit with a more intense fire. ... What could I say to this boy? Anything I might say would be trivial and superficial, like pink frosting flowers. I felt the whole world before this to be frivolous, superficial, ephemeral.”

Anne Morrow and Charles Lindbergh were married in a private ceremony on May 27, 1929 at the home of her parents in Englewood, New Jersey.

That year, Anne flew solo for the first time, and in 1930 became the first American woman to earn a first class glider pilot's license. In the 1930s, Anne and Charles together explored and charted air routes between continents. The Lindberghs were the first to fly from Africa to South America, and explored polar air routes from North America to Asia and Europe.

Their first child, Charles Jr, was born on Anne's 24th birthday, June 22, 1930.

Kidnapping

In an incident widely known as the "Lindbergh kidnapping", the Lindberghs' first child, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., was kidnapped at 20 months of age from their home in East Amwell, New Jersey outside Hopewell on March 1, 1932. After a massive investigation, a baby's body, presumed to be that of Charles Lindbergh Jr., was discovered the following May 12, some four miles (6 km) from the Lindberghs' home, at the summit of a hill on the Hopewell-Mt. Rose Highway.

Exile

The frenzied press attention paid to the Lindberghs, particularly after the kidnapping of their son and later the trial, conviction and execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, prompted Charles and Anne to move first to England, to a house called Long Barn owned by Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, and later to the small island of Illiec, off the coast of Brittany in France.

While in Europe, the Lindberghs came to advocate isolationist views that led to their fall from grace in the eyes of many. In the late 1930s, the U.S. Air Attaché in Berlin invited Charles Lindbergh to inspect the rising power of Nazi Germany's Air Force. Impressed by German technology and their apparent number of aircraft, as well as influenced by the staggering number of deaths from World War I, Lindbergh opposed U.S. entry into the impending European conflict. Anne wrote a book titled The Wave of the Future, arguing that something resembling fascism was the unfortunate "wave of the future", echoing authors such as Lawrence Dennis and later James Burnham.

Return to the US

In 1938, the Lindberghs moved back to the United States. Due to his outspoken beliefs about a future war that would envelop their homeland, the antiwar America First Committee quickly adopted Charles Lindbergh as their leader in 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany's declaration of war, the committee disbanded, and Charles pressed to become involved in the military, eventually finding a way to enter combat, albeit as a civilian.

Charles and Anne Lindbergh had five more children: sons Jon, Land and Scott, and daughters Anne and Reeve.

Later life

After the war, Anne and Charles wrote books that rebuilt the reputations they had gained and lost before World War II. The publication of Gift from the Sea in 1955 earned her place as "one of the leading advocates of the nascent environmental movement" and became a national best seller.

Over the course of their 45-year marriage, Charles and Anne lived in New Jersey, New York, England, France, Maine, Michigan, Connecticut, Switzerland, and Hawaii. Charles died on Maui in 1974. Though (typically) he never showed it, Charles was hurt by Anne's three-year affair in the early 1950s with her personal doctor.

According to Rudolf Schröck, author of Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh (Heyne Verlag, 2005), from 1957 until his death in 1974, Charles had an affair with Brigitte Hesshaimer, a Bavarian woman 24 years his junior, that produced three children, whom he supported financially. In 2003, a spokeman for the Hesshaimer family indicated that DNA tests conducted by the University of Munich proved that Lindbergh fathered the three children. According to Schröck, Charles also had sexual relationships with Brigitte's sister Marietta, who bore him two sons, and with his former private secretary, who bore him two more children.

After suffering a series of strokes in the early 1990s, which left her confused and disabled, Anne continued to live in her home in Connecticut with the assistance of round-the-clock caregivers. During a visit to her daughter Reeve's family in 1999, she came down with pneumonia, after which she went to live near Reeve in a small home built on Reeve's Vermont farm, where Anne died in 2001 at the age of 94 from another stroke. Reeve Lindbergh's book, No More Words tells the story of her mother's last years.

Honors and awards

Anne received numerous honors and awards throughout her life in recognition of her contributions to both literature and aviation. In 1933, she received the U.S. Flag Association Cross of Honor for having taken part in surveying transatlantic air routes. The following year, she was awarded the Hubbard Medal by the National Geographic Society for having completed 40,000 miles (64,000 km) of exploratory flying with her husband Charles Lindbergh—a feat that took them to five continents. In 1993, Women in Aerospace presented her with an Aerospace Explorer Award in recognition of her achievements in, and contributions to, the aerospace field.

In addition to being the recipient of honorary Masters and Doctor of Letters degrees from her alma mater Smith College (1935 and 1970), Anne also received honorary degrees from Amherst College (1939), the University of Rochester (1939), Middlebury College (1976), and Gustavus Adolphus College (1985). She was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame (1979), the National Women's Hall of Fame (1996), the Aviation Hall of Fame of New Jersey, and the International Women in Aviation Pioneer Hall of Fame (1999).[1] She received the Christopher Award for War Within and Without, the last installment of her published diaries.

Bibliography of Anne Morrow Lindbergh works

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Morrow_Lindbergh#Bibliography_of_...