Description
Book SynopsisWriting the Heavenly Frontier celebrates the early voices of the air as it examines the sky as a metaphorical and political landscape. While flight histories usually focus on the physical dangers of early aviation, this book introduces the figurative liabilities of ascension. Early pilot-writers not only grappled with an unwieldy machine; they also grappled with poetics that were extremely selective. Tropes that cast Charles Lindbergh as the transcendent hero of the new millennium were the same ones that kept women, black Americans, and indigenous peoples imaginatively tethered to the ground. The most popular flight autobiographies in the United States posited a hero who rose from the mundane to the miraculous; and yet the most startling autobiographies point out the social factors that limited or forbade vertical movement—both literally and figuratively. A survey of pilot writing, the book will appeal to flight enthusiasts and people interested in American autobiography and culture. But it will also appeal strongly to readers interested in the poetics and politics of place.
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Writing the Heavenly Frontier The Mundane to the Miraculous Imaginative Geographies and the Invention of the Aerial Subject From Pilot to Poet: The Transformation of Lindbergh Polar Frontiers and Public Fictions: Skyward with Richard E. Byrd The Colors of the Earth and the Sanctity of Space Autobiographical Demands and Historical Realities Jimmy Collins and the Tethers of Materiality Flight as Emancipation: William J. Powell’s Dream of Black Wings Masculine Spaces and Women Flyers The Flying Boudoir The Sound of Wings: Autobiographies by Amelia Earhart Louise Thaden and the Tethers of Motherhood Flight as Upward Mobility: Jackie Cochran and the Stars at Noon Aerial Geographies and Imperial Discourses Transcendence Abroad Cultivating the Garden: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the Noble Struggle Escaping the Wilderness: Anne Morrow Lindbergh and the Epic Journey Epilogue: Late Century Metaphors: Larry Walters and the Rich Man’s Wedding Cake Index
