Reception
The Spirit of St. Louis was an overwhelming bestseller and generated near universal praise and favorable reviews. The Book-of-the-Month Club alone sold over 100,000 copies in the first year, with several hundred thousand additional copies sold in bookstores and elsewhere. The Chicago Daily News called it a "stunning, tremendously beautiful reading experience ... a classic of adventure writing." Time noted, "At its exciting best, this book keeps the reader cockpit close to a rare adventure." And Lindbergh biographer Brendan Gill concluded, "The best authority on Lindbergh is Lindbergh."
In his book review that appeared in The New York Times on September 13, 1953, Quentin Reynolds wrote:
| “ | At last we have a book that explains and humanizes Lindbergh; that brings him into the company of his fellow mortals. The book is The Spirit of St. Louis, and it is of course written by the one man who really knows Lindbergh—himself. He spent fourteen years in the writing of it; the years were well spent.
Were this merely a personal account of his almost miraculous flight it would have interest, but not much significance. But this is far more than that; this is a frank and fascinating autobiography that destroys the myth of the phlegmatic, nerveless airman impervious to doubt and to the uncertainties that plague lesser mortals. Lindbergh had his moments of doubt and fear, when fourteen hours out of Roosevelt Field ice appeared on the wings of his plane and when black thunderheads loomed ahead. "They are barbaric in their methods. They lash you with their hailstones, poison you with freezing mist." No, Lindbergh during that flight was not merely a robot-like figure at the stick, he was not the supremely confident master of his plane and of his destiny. Was he on the right course? 'Am I heading for Africa instead of Europe?' he asked himself in desperate anxiety. His book is written in the present tense, a happy choice, for somehow this style sustains the tension of the flight and enables the reader to feel himself a stowaway aboard the plane, sharing the dangers, the uncertainties and the eventual triumph. It takes quite a bit of literary skill to sustain the first person singular, present indicative, throughout five hundred pages, but take the word of this awed and amazed reader, Lindbergh writes as well as he flies, and the interest and suspense never lessen." |
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Read more about this topic: The Spirit Of St. Louis (book)
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