American · 1906–2001
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) was born in Englewood, New Jersey, the daughter of banker and U.S. Senator Dwight Morrow and poet Elizabeth Cutter Morrow. She graduated from Smith College in 1928 and, the next year, married Charles Lindbergh, four years after his solo transatlantic flight made him the most famous man in America. He taught her to fly; she became the first American woman to earn a glider pilot's license and served as his copilot and radio operator on survey flights across five continents, work she recorded in North to the Orient and Listen! The Wind, both National Book Award winners. In 1932 their infant son, Charles Jr., was kidnapped and murdered, a tragedy she wrote about only decades later, in her published diaries. Her most enduring book, Gift from the Sea (1955), became a bestseller and a touchstone of postwar women's writing. She died in Passumpsic, Vermont, in 2001.