Amelia Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, days away from completing her record-setting flight around the world. The official search was abandoned after 16 days. The unofficial search has never ended.
In Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, Rachel Hartigan retraces the three main theories of Earhart’s disappearance, introducing a cast of eccentric characters consumed by discovering the truth. Did the aviator and her navigator fly off course to spy on Japanese military bases, only to be captured? Did they land on a remote Pacific island—where Hartigan traveled—and die as castaways? Or did they run out of fuel and crash into the ocean?
Hartigan, a former National Geographic writer, intersperses the search for Earhart with the story of Earhart’s extraordinary life—her unstable childhood, her itinerant early career, and her unconventional marriage to a PR-savvy publisher who transformed her into an aviation icon—and illuminates why we remember Amelia Earhart today.
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Rachel Hartigan is the author of Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life. She has written about everything from the genetics of persimmon trees to the long road to women's suffrage for National Geographic, where she worked as a writer, reporter, and editor from 2012 to 2024. A former editor of the Washington Post's Book World, she also covered education and culture for U.S. News & World Report. She covered two expeditions for National Geographic to Nikumaroro, the uninhabited Pacific island where some people believe Amelia Earhart died a castaway.