FLY GIRLS

A thrilling, adventure-filled story of six female pilots in the early days of aviation (1927-1936), by an award-winning journalist and author.

Readers will be swept away by this forgotten moment in history: when air races in open cockpit airplanes attracted huge crowds, and young pilots were considered fearless gladiators. Female pilots—just as courageous as the men, probably more so—were originally barred from racing against men, deemed too weak to compete and too small to count. But over the course of nine tumultuous, and often deadly, years, women brazenly fought their way into the skies, transcending air-racing and sports, to forever change gender roles and cultural norms.

Fly Girls is the riveting tale of a six underdogs: Florence Klingensmith, a high-school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner in Fargo, North Dakota, but dreamed of soaring in the sky and went door-to-door seeking investors to make it happen; Ruth Elder, a young divorcée from Alabama, and the first woman to try to match Lindbergh’s transatlantic feat to the outcry of the world; Blanche Noyes, a Broadway actress, who came by flying the old-fashioned way (she married a pilot); Amelia Earhart, the most famous of them, thanks to a savvy New York publicity machine; Ruth Nichols, a Wellesley College graduate, New York socialite and ambitious aviator dubbed “the Flying Debutante”; and Louise Thaden, a lanky stick of a woman from rural Arkansas, with no real chance of flying. But she went for her dream anyway, with the help of two unlikely benefactors: a husband-wife plane manufacturing company in Kansas.

These fearless women battled each other in the skies and on the ground, banded together to survive, fought the system and the misogynistic men behind it, died fiery deaths on more than one occasion for their efforts, and, in the end, not only won, but beat the men at their own game. O’Brien will weave together the women’s stories, along with the narratives of the men trying to stop them from flying.

Keith O’Brien is an award-winning journalist and author who has written for the New York Times Magazine, Politico, Slate, Esquire, the Washington Post, and USA Today. A frequent contributor to National Public Radio and a former staff writer for the Boston Globe, O’Brien won the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. He’s the author of two books; Catching the Sky (Simon & Schuster 2016) and Outside Shot (St. Martin’s 2013)