The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh (153) – Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
One of the longer submissions in our Siblings’ Book Club this year was The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles A. Lindbergh (1953). While this book chronicles a truly daring adventure—the first non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927—it’s much more describes Lindbergh’s preparation for the adventure and his looks back at 25 years of life.
As such, it might not appeal to everyone, but I loved it!
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The Spirit of St. Louis Book Summary
Although this book remains a classic in Aviation literature, it feels much more like some other 20-something adventures I’ve read, like Jack London’s The Road, Peter Jenkins’ A Walk Across America, or Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aaron Ralston. Rich with detail and introspection, this book is far more about the flyer and his dream than the flight itself. Of course, weighing in at 526 pages, it certainly makes room for everything.
Lindbergh details his process of moving from working and dreaming, though preparation, to the flight itself chronologically, but he also fills his pages with so many memories that sometimes it’s hard to tell!
He opens the book with his experiences as a Midwestern overnight airmail flyer and the dream that kept him awake—to be the first man to make this historic flight across the Atlantic. From here, he traces some of the stories of those who had attempted it an failed, those who are currently planning to try, and his own efforts to make his dream a reality.
Much of the front half of the book is about Lindbergh’s search for partners, funding, and the right kind of plane capable of making such an epic journey. While these chapters might bore some readers, the details fascinated me, and I think I know why. One of my favorite TV series is The Long Way Round, the first in a series of global motorcycle travels starring Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman. The initial episodes of preparation were (to me) as entertaining as the journey itself. It might be the nerd in me.
Once Lindberg acquires his funding and gets the plane built, he flies it across the USA and continues to drum up support for his grand attempt. All the while, he keeps us readers updated on the other attempts by sharing newspaper headlines from around the world—headlines that occasionally report the deaths and disappearances of flyers who didn’t succeed. All of this adds further suspense to the account, because although we all know Lindbergh eventually arrives in Paris, we don’t necessarily know the scrapes he endures while getting there.
The remaining 60% of the book covers the 30 hours of the flight itself, recorded hour-by-hour and filled with Lindbergh’s struggles to stay awake, his hallucinations, his views from the air, and his recollections of past events. I appreciated his style in writing, and I remained fixated throughout. I suppose the book did win the Pulitzer, so that shouldn’t be too surprising!
Some Things I Loved and Learned from The Spirit of St. Louis
I’ve got to mention from the outset how incredible it was that this kid did something no human had ever done before. He flew across an ocean by dead reconning, fully aware of how Earth’s curvature would affect his calculations! He knew the risk, and he knew that his survival depended upon his machine, his skill, and his luck. That he was willing to risk it all was an incredible lesson in bravado.
Apart from the obvious, I also appreciated the following topics and quotes.
Recollections and Memory
Lindbergh’s memorable anecdotes of the past were almost always fascinating. Whether it was his early experiences and as a wing-walker and parachutist or his grandfather’s stories of facing the Indians in wild Minnesota long ago (in “The Seventh Hour”), Lindbergh peppers this book with great tales of Americana. He even finds some benefit in the imperfections of memory when he write this:
Searching memory might be compared to throwing the beam of a strong light, from your hilltop camp site, back over the road you traveled by day. Only a few of the objects you passed are clearly illuminated; countless others are hidden behind them, screened from the rays. … There is bound to be some vagueness and distortion in the distance. But memory has advantages that compensate for its failings. By eliminating detail, it clarifies the picture as a whole. Like an artist’s brush, it finds higher value in life’s essence than in its photographic intricacy. (4)
Flying
Lindbergh doesn’t shy away from the fact that he was just a young kid working his weird, misunderstood profession of night-airmail from St. Louis to Chicago, constantly thinking about the future of aviation. His goal wasn’t simply fame (though that had a lot to do with it), but it was an attempt to get people excited about flight. He was, after all, only a few short decades away from the Wright Brothers and the very invention of the flying machine!
He waxes on about it throughout the book, but I love how he describes his joys as a pilot here:
What freedom lies in flying! What godlike power it gives to man! I’m independent of the seaman’s coast lines, of the landsman’s roads. (118)
Self-Reliance
Lindbergh handles his perpetual introspection with honesty and (as should be expected from a young man writing his own memoirs) a heavy dose of arrogance. For instance, he already know that the following line describes anyone but himself:
People who talk a lot about what they’re going to do seldom accomplish their predictions. (136)
He acknowledges many of his own mistakes throughout, but, go-getter that he is, he’s also quick to share how he’s been able to get himself out of scrapes and binds through his own ingenuity and tenacity. Take this passage on adventure as an example:
Wing walking, parachute jumping, pursuit planes, the night mail, and now this flight across the ocean—I’ve never chosen the safer branches of aviation. I’ve followed adventure, not safety. I’ve flown for the love of flying, done the things I wanted most to do. I’ve simply studied carefully whatever I’ve undertaken, and tried to hold a reserve that would carry me through. (295)
Journalism
This self-reliance was certainly important to Lindbergh, because very often his very life depended upon it. The following quote was given in the context how untrustworthy journalism had become, yet it also highlights the importance of trust and accuracy in aviation:
[Some] statements make “good stories,” and the fact that they’re not true causes little disturbance to the press. Accuracy, I’ve learned, is secondary to circulation—a thing to be sacrificed, when occasion arises, to a degree depending on the standards of each paper. But accuracy means something to me. It’s vital to my sense of values. I’ve learned not to trust people who are inaccurate. Every aviator knows that if mechanics are inaccurate, aircraft crash. If pilots are inaccurate, they get lost — sometimes killed. In my profession life itself depends on accuracy. (215)
Butterflies
He didn’t write much about my favorite creature, the humble butterfly, but he did make this comment below, and I loved it.
A cushion of air lies close to the water. On it, wings glide more smoothly; the tail lifts higher, the waves flash by, and a plane races along with lessened effort. I drop down till my wheels are less than a man’s height above the rollers. The Spirit of St. Louis is like a butterfly blown out to sea. How often I used to watch them, as a child, on the banks of the Mississippi, dancing up and down above the water, as I am dancing now; up and down with their own fancy and the currents of air. But a touch of wing to water, and they were down forever, just as my plane would be. I saw dozens of them floating, broken and lifeless, in eddying currents near our shore. Why, I used to wonder, had they ever left the safety of the land. But why have I? How similar my position has become! (246)
I’ve been out of the lake before, almost too far to see land, and up across the water wings a butterfly. I think, “What in the world is he thinking!”—which is exactly what people had thought about Lindbergh himself. Quite a poignant passage.
God
While Lindbergh did write a little about God, his beliefs, his experiences in church, and life growing up in a Senator’s family, he didn’t waste very much ink on these unimportant bits of information. It seems like his 25-year-old conclusion was roughly what wrote here:
On the sleeping porch of our new house, I lay awake in evenings, staring out at the sky, thinking about God and life and death. One might meet God after one died, I decided, but He didn’t have much to do with life; no one I knew had ever seen Him, and the people who didn’t believe in Him seemed to get along as well as those who did. (362)
With this in mind, I’m tempted to learn more about his later years. I know I’ve heard about “the Lindbergh baby,” and while I recall some details about this true crime, I don’t know nearly enough. That might be an interesting study for the future—to learn the truth and to see whether tragedy affected him spiritually the same way as triumph had.
Conclusion
While I might be the only person in the group willing to tackle this book this year, I’m glad I did. It was a great adventure, well-paced and lively, and an informative look at the birth of aviation more than 100 years ago.
©2025 E.T.