Lindbergh, Anne Morrow 1906–2001

(Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh)

PERSONAL: Born 1906, in Englewood, NJ; died February 7, 2001, in Passumsic, VT; daughter of Dwight Whitney (former U.S. ambassador to Mexico) and Elizabeth Reeve (Cutter) Morrow; married Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. (an aviator; first pilot to fly from New York to Paris), May 27, 1929 (died August 26, 1974); children: Charles Augustus III (died, 1932), Jon Morrow, Land Morrow (son), Anne Spencer (died, 1993), Reeve (daughter), Scott. Education: Smith College, B.A., 1928.

CAREER: Writer. Former director, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (publishers), San Francisco.

AWARDS, HONORS: Cross of Honor, U.S. Flag Association, 1933, for part in survey of trans-Atlantic air routes; Hubbard Gold Medal, National Geographic Society, 1934, for work as copilot and radio operator in flight of 40,000 miles over five continents; honorary M.A., Smith College, 1935; honorary LL.D., Amherst College, 1939, University of Rochester, 1939.

WRITINGS:

North to the Orient (travel), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1935.

Listen! The Wind (travel), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1938.

The Wave of the Future (essay), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1940.

The Steep Ascent (novel), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1944.

Gift from the Sea (essays; also see below), Pantheon (New York, NY), 1955, twentieth-anniversary edition, with an afterword by the author, Vintage (New York, NY), 1975, reprinted, Random House (New York, NY), 1995.

The Unicorn and Other Poems, 1935–1955, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1956.

Dearly Beloved (novel), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1962, reprinted, Chicago Review Press (Chicago IL), 2003.

Earth Shine (nonfiction), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1969.

Christmas in Mexico: 1972, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1971.

Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1972.

Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929–1932, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1973.

Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1932–1935, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1974.

The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1936–1939, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1976.

War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939–1944, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1980.

(Author of introduction) James D. Newton, Uncommon Friends: Remembering Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Alexis Carrel, and Charles Lindbergh, 1987.

(Author of introduction) Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wartime Writings, 1939–1944, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1990.

SIDELIGHTS: While Anne Morrow Lindbergh is widely respected as an author of philosophical novels and essays, she is even better known for having lived "a life that most scenario writers would hesitate to invent," observed Glendy Culligan in Saturday Review. The dramatic events of Lindbergh's life, including her marriage to aviation pioneer Charles A. Lindbergh, her participation in early experimental flights, the notorious abduction and murder of their first child, and a successful career as an author, have made best sellers of her published diaries and letters.

Lindbergh was born into "what may have been the closest knit nuclear family in modern history," noted Jane Howard in the Washington Post Book World. Her father, Dwight Morrow, was at various times a partner to banker J.P. Morgan, an ambassador, and a U.S. senator. Her mother, Elizabeth Cutter Morrow, was a poet, a trustee of Smith College, and a crusader for equal education for women. The Morrows' wealth and status ensured that their children, all daughters, were well educated and well traveled at an early age. It also produced a "haze of insulation which permeated our early years," an "indefinable sense of isolation from the world," notes Lindbergh in the introduction to the first volume of her diaries, Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She explains, "No matter what we read or where we traveled we were enclosed in the familial circle, confined, although also enriched, by the strong family bonds and strictly defined child-parent roles."

"Only in college did I begin to realize how much I resembled the 'sheltered Emelye' of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, enclosed in a walled garden," Lindbergh continues. Her years at Smith College were important for discovering the existence of a world beyond her sheltered circle, but her preoccupation with her family was still dominant. In 1927 she eagerly anticipated spending Christmas with her relatives in Mexico, where her father was then U.S. ambassador. When Anne heard that America's hero, Charles A. Lindbergh, would also be visiting the embassy as part of a good-will tour, she was unimpressed, admitting only "a little annoyance" at "all this public-hero stuff breaking into our family party." Meeting Charles swept away her indifference, however, and before the Christmas holiday was over, she admitted that she was hopelessly in love with him. He returned her feelings, and after several months, the couple announced their engagement. By that time, Anne realized that her fiancé's celebrity status would forever rule out the secluded life she preferred, but it made no difference. "Don't wish me happiness," she wrote to a friend. "I don't expect to be happy, but it's gotten beyond that…. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor—I will need them all."

The first years of the Lindberghs' marriage are covered in the second volume of her published diaries and letters, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929–1932. Anne learned the skills necessary to serve as Charles' copilot, navigator, and radio operator, and the newlyweds spent most of the early days of their marriage in the air. The hysterical hero-worship Charles had inspired since his solo New York-Paris flight in 1927 was only intensified by his marriage to Anne and their subsequent adventures together. "To millions around the world—reading of the Lindberghs flying everywhere in their own Lockheed Sirius seaplane, looking at photographs of the 'perfect'-looking couple ('the lone eagle and his mate') landing in Siberia, China, Japan—the Lindberghs seemed to enjoy the greatest possible good fortune that a young couple could have," wrote Alfred Kazin in his New York Times Book Review article on Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead. The image of perfection was completed in 1930 by the birth of their first child, Charles A. Lindbergh III. But on March 1, 1932, the illusion was shattered. That evening, when Anne went upstairs to check the child before retiring, she found his crib empty; the baby had been kidnaped.

Weeks passed in frantic investigations and negotiations. Over twelve thousand people wrote to describe dreams they had had envisioning the exact location of the missing child. Al Capone and other crime bosses offered their help. Reporters, photographers, and state troopers laid siege to the Lindberghs' New Jersey residence. Newspapers had extras ready at every hour, prepared to announce the baby's safe return. But on May 12, 1932, his body was found in a ditch not far from the Lindbergh home. "Rarely has a personal tragedy had such public reverberations and consequences," stated Kazin. "A whole simplistic 'American' idea of life died with the Lindbergh baby."

The parents' anguish over the loss of their baby was exacerbated by the relentless public exposure to which they were subjected. "The contrast between the Lindbergh character and the Lindbergh case is painful and ominous in its interest," noted Kazin. "Both the Lindberghs have always been intensely private persons, with an austere, restrained, glowingly creative sense of life. Their laconic self-confidence (old American style) hardly prepared them for the hideous absurdity (contemporary American style) of their public anxiety and laceration…. Their natural sensitiveness was intensified, after the kidnaping, by armies of reporters, photographers, marauders, publicity seekers, vandals who drove by the house just long enough to kill a dog, shakedown artists of every kind who tried to cash in on the case."

Lindbergh's diary Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1932–1935 details the family's recovery from their trauma. The diary depicts Charles as an invaluable source of support for Anne. He urged her to begin writing the story of their daring 1931 survey flight to the Orient via the Arctic Circle, and he later convinced her to assist him in a five-month flight exploring the Atlantic for commercial air routes. Although reluctant to leave her new baby, Jon, born in August, 1932, Anne welcomed the solitude of flight. "Flying was normal life for us," she explains in her introduction to Locked Rooms. "The project lifted us out of the aftermath of crime and turned the publicity that surrounded us to a constructive end—the advance of air travel…. For me, the trip was the nearest approximation to 'a life of our own' that could then be found. It meant more freedom, more privacy with my husband, and more contact with people in natural surroundings…. All these factors were restoring." Reviewers have characterized Lindbergh's account of these years in Locked Rooms and Open Doors as many variations on a theme of anguish. Locked Rooms and Open Doors "is an autobiography of being imprisoned in bad dreams, great demands, self-doubt, and painful fatigue," commented Catharine R. Stimpson in the New York Times Book Review.

Lindbergh's engrossing personal life during this time—as she and her husband recovered from their loss and struggled to continue on with their aviation work, Lindbergh was beginning to publish her writing even as their family continued to grow—takes over the majority of this volume of the journal. Thus the greater world beyond the private one is largely left unexplored here. "She lived on the sharp edge of history, as observer, actor, and symbol; but the energy for analysis of the great forces of the present seems to have been blunted or deflected," Stimpson observed. By contrast, The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1936–1939, Lindbergh's next volume of published journals, takes as its main theme the encroaching war in Europe as the Lindbergh's witness firsthand the growing power of Hitler and the German military.

The Lindberghs' sought some relief from the relentless encroachments of reporters, well-wishers, and crazies whose interest in the couple surged once again with their return to the United States and the onset of the trial of their baby's alleged kidnapper, Bruno Hauptmann. Privacy and safety began to seem impossibilities in the United States, so after the trial and the publication of Anne's book North to the Orient, the couple took their baby and fled to a self-imposed exile in England and Europe. Anne described these experiences in The Flower and the Nettle.

They found a welcome peace in England. Charles again encouraged Anne to pursue her writing, and she began work on the story of their Atlantic flight, which was published as Listen! The Wind. Reviews of North to the Orient had been strongly favorable, Edward Weeks writing in Atlantic Bookshelf: "One's first impression of the book is that Anne Lindbergh writes so well that she must not stop." Publication of Listen! The Wind solidified her reputation as critics emphasized that Lindbergh's elegant, graceful prose gives the book an importance that goes far beyond its historical significance. Listen! The Wind "is a record of technical achievement, a record historically valuable; in Anne Lindbergh's hands it becomes literature," enthused Katherine Woods in the New York Times Book Review. In Books, William Soskin called the author "one of the finest writers in America, one who has emerged to an artistry which the most meticulous of critics cannot challenge."

After two years in England, punctuated by several flights and the birth of another son, the Lindberghs moved to France. World War II was by now brewing in Europe. Politically, Charles was an isolationist who believed for many reasons that the United States should not become involved in a foreign conflict. When the U.S. government asked him to quietly investigate the growth of the German air force, however, he willingly complied. The American press questioned his frequent, unexplained visits to Germany and began to paint a new picture of their former hero as a possible Nazi sympathizer. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Lindberghs returned to the United States—and to a new public ordeal, as they were publicly reviled as traitors for their isolationist stance.

Lindbergh's account of these years in letters and journals is collected in The Flower and the Nettle, in which a sense of personal happiness and contentment is commingled with growing dread of the approaching political calamity spreading through Europe. Lindbergh's social position meant that during these years she met some of the most powerful people in Europe, and her account of their opinions and attitudes during this period is considered a valuable addition to the historical record. Of greater interest, according to Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb in the Magill's Literary Annual, is Lindbergh's own character. "Through the flowing, unobtrusive prose of her diaries and her letters to close friends and relatives, she shows her intense awareness of her natural surroundings, her sensitivity to the people around her, her self-doubt, her courage, her humor, her acute judgment of others, and, above all, her dedication to her responsibility to her family, her work, and herself."

With war fever mounting, isolationism was popularly considered tantamount to treason. The individualistic Charles was not ashamed of his stance, but it quickly earned him the titles of anti-Semite and pro-Nazi. Although Anne only partly agreed with his position, she felt obliged to support it. Her 1940 book The Wave of the Future was, according to Joseph P. Lash in the New York Times Book Review, her "effort to build a bridge between her husband's position and her own…. In it she argues for staying out of the war and concentrating on domestic reform because, among other reasons, Italy, Germany, and Russia, whatever their flaws, are symptoms of a new world struggling to be born." Anne's style was once again generally praised by critics such as Clare Boothe who, in Current History and Forum, deemed it "clear, chiseled, cadenced—almost classic." But, stated Lash, "people Lindbergh cared about damned the widely-read book as a plea for appeasement and a condonation of totalitarianism,… a lyrical and silver-coated exposition of the views expressed by Charles."

Strangers threatened new disasters for the Lindbergh children as retribution for their parents' politics. Old friends, alienated by the isolationist issue, spoke publicly against them. When Charles offered his services to the Roosevelt administration he was turned down. He then offered his services to private companies involved in the war effort; of these, only the Ford Motor Company in Detroit was powerful enough to defy the Roosevelt administration's disapproval and accept Lindbergh's offer of help. "I have had three big things to fight against in my life," wrote Anne at the time. "The first was just sorrow (the kidnapping case), the second was fear (the flights), and the third is bitterness (this whole war struggle). And the third is the hardest."

The stress brought by wartime issues did not keep Anne from writing, however. Indeed, Charles "pressed her, almost fiercely, to write and was angry when household chores or children intervened…. To make sure she had a quiet place to work, he pitched a tent above the beach at Martha's Vineyard, set up a trailer behind their house outside Detroit," explained Washington Post Book World contributor Katherine Winton Evans. "Almost all our quarrels," wrote Anne in 1941, "arise from this passionate desire to see me freed to fulfill what there is in me." Lindbergh's account of these and other experiences during the early 1940s may be found in the diaries and letters collected under the title War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939–1944.

In 1944 Anne Lindbergh's first novel was published as The Steep Ascent, and was well received by critics. "It would be a pity if those who were disturbed by Mrs. Lindbergh's last book The Wave of the Future were to ignore this one because of it," cautioned Amy Loveman in Saturday Review. "For they would lose in so doing one of the most beautifully written, sensitive, and lovely volumes which has appeared since those earlier ones which were akin to it, North to the Orient and Listen! The Wind." Like those books, The Steep Ascent tells of a perilous flight made by a woman and her husband. "As always there is the exquisite delicacy of expression, the talent for the right word, the right phrase, and the descriptions that are acute observations of the passing scene filtered through the screen of personality…. To the beauty which her earlier books had there is added excitement in this one," declared Loveman. "As an adventure story it is keen and exciting," affirmed New York Times Book Review contributor Beatrice Sherman, "but it is much more than that. Its charm and grace are rooted in the fabric of the author's mind and in the fruit of her philosophy."

Following The Steep Ascent, Gift from the Sea was to become one of Lindbergh's most enduring works, a book that has remained in print since its first edition. It is a collection of essays with the central theme of "the tremendous and ever-encroaching problem of how to maintain an inner serenity in the midst of the distractions of life, how to remain balanced, no matter what forces tend to pull one off center; how to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships and activities," as Sara Henderson Hay wrote in Saturday Review. Each essay takes the form of a meditation on a seashell, and Elizabeth Gray Vining noted in the New York Times Book Review that Gift from the Sea "is like a shell itself, in its small and perfect form, the delicate spiraling of its thought, the poetry of its color, and its rhythm from the sea, which tells of light and life and love and the security that lies at the heart of intermittency." Although it "deals with the essential needs, gifts, obligations and aspirations of woman as distinct from those of man, it is in no sense merely what is sometimes slightingly called a woman's book. A sensitive, tensile, original mind probes delicately into questions of balance and relationship in the world today, and the result is a book for human beings who are mature or in search of maturity, whether men or women." Gift from the Sea is also considered an important feminist document from an era during which little if any dissent was voiced regarding the proper role for women in American life. Lindbergh's struggle with maintaining a sense of self while dedicating the majority of her waking hours in service to children, husband, social obligations, and career, is a precursor to the public ruminations of women decades later on the trials and tribulations of "having it all."

The Unicorn and Other Poems was Lindbergh's next published work. "There are many beautiful lyrics here," praised Robert Hillyer in the New York Times Book Review. "The reader will be well rewarded who joins the poet in this garden by the mortal sea whence, from time to time, rifts in the clouds show flashes from immortality." But Saturday Review poetry editor John Ciardi's review stood in strong disagreement. "As a reviewer not of Mrs. Lindbergh but of her poems I have, in duty, nothing but contempt to offer," Ciardi wrote. "I am compelled to believe that Mrs. Lindbergh has written an offensively bad book—inept, jingling, slovenly, illiterate even, and puffed up with the foolish afflatus of a stereotyped high-seriousness, that species of esthetic and human failure that will accept any shriek as a true high-C." A month after Ciardi's review appeared, Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins reported: "Ciardi's review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's The Unicorn and Other Poems has produced the biggest storm of reader protest in the thirty-three-year history of The Saturday Review. Hundreds of readers have hastened to tell us of their pointed disapproval of Mr. Ciardi's review; four have written in his support…. There are few living authors who are using the English language more sensitively or with more genuine appeal than Lindbergh. There is in her books a respect for human responses to beauty and for the great connections between humankind and nature that gives her work rare distinction and that earns her the gratitude and loyalty of her readers, as the present episode makes clear."

Lindbergh's audience was considerably widened when publication of her diaries began in 1972. The public was eager to read the inside story on the celebrated couple, and the diaries sold briskly. Lindbergh had at first been reluctant to expose her personal papers. "William Jovanovich, who was my husband's publisher as well as mine, knew that I kept diaries and told me I should publish them," she explained in a New York Times Book Review interview with Carol Lawson. "But I wrote them because I had to, not to get them published." An autobiography was considered as a means of preserving Lindbergh's sense of privacy, but it was finally decided that the original journals would be published. She explains her decision in the introduction to Locked Rooms: "When one has processed and packaged part of one's life in books, as I have, it is fair to ask, Why not leave it in that form? Why go back to the imperfect raw material of the diaries? Why publish the grimy minutiae of preparing for a trip; the tedium of long hours of work, the reluctant early risings; the exasperations of cold feet and dusty clothes; the irrational night terrors, lost tempers, and depressions? Because, after sixty, I think, one knows the ups and downs that life holds for everyone, and would like—a last chance—to see and present, truthfully and not glamorized, what happened."

Her decision to print the original journals and letters won the approval of readers and reviewers alike. According to Glendy Culligan of Saturday Review, the "letters and diaries achieve both spontaneity and art, thanks in part to her style, in part to a built-in plot and a soul-searching heroine worthy of a Bronte novel. In only one respect does Mrs. Lindbergh fail to meet her own standard of candor. When she introduces herself as 'this quite ordinary person' any reader with a long memory is bound to smile."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, North to the Orient, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1935.

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, Listen! The Wind, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1938.

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, Bring Me a Unicorn: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1972.

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters, 1929–1932, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1973.

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters, 1932–1935, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1974.

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, The Flower and the Nettle: Diaries and Letters, 1936–1939, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1976.

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow, War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters, 1939–1944, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1980.

Lindbergh, Reeve, No More Words: A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2001.

Mayer, Elsie F., My Window on the World: The Works of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Archon, 1988.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, A Sense of Life, translated by Adrienne Foulke, Funk & Wagnalls (New York, NY), 1965.

Vaughn, David Kirk, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1988.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic, November, 1995, p. 121.

Atlantic Bookshelf, October, 1935.

Books, October 16, 1938.

Chicago Tribune, April 4, 1980.

Commonweal, September 7, 1956, pp. 568-570.

Current History and Forum, November 7, 1940.

Horn Book, September-October, 1994, p. 589.

Magill's Literary Annual, 1977, pp. 294-298.

National Review, May 12, 1972, pp. 528, 530.

Newsweek, April 11, 1955.

New Yorker, March 21, 1974.

New York Times, September 9, 1956; October 12, 1969; February 21, 1970; April 20, 1974; April 29, 1980; August 2, 1980.

New York Times Book Review, October 16, 1938; November 3, 1940; March 19, 1944, p. 3; March 20, 1955, p. 1; September 9, 1956; June 10, 1962, pp. 6, 23; February 27, 1972; March 4, 1973, pp. 1, 10; March 24, 1974, pp. 28, 30; April 20, 1980; June 15, 1980; January 15, 1995, p. 25.

Saturday Review, October 15, 1938; March 18, 1944; February 2, 1955; January 12, 1957, pp. 54-57; February 16, 1957, pp. 22-25, 54-55; June 9, 1962; March 4, 1972, pp. 72-75.

School Library Journal, April, 1994, p. 128.

Time, September 17, 1956; June 8, 1962; March 11, 1974.

Times Literary Supplement, February 26, 1971; August 11, 1972.

Washington Post Book World, March 10, 1974; April 27, 1980.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, February 8, 2001, sec. 2, p. 11.

Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2001, p. A1, A28.

New York Times, February 8, 2001, p. A26.

People, February 26, 2001, "The Hero's Wife: Playing Second Lead in Her Husband's Storied Life, Anne Morrow Lindbergh Created a Compelling Role of Her Own," p. 103.

Times (London, England), February 9, 2001.