So begins Brendan Gill's book about the most extraordinary feat of one of our country's most extraordinary men. With clarity of vision and characteristic elegance, Gill gives us in Lindbergh Alone a meditation on one man's unprecedented accomplishment, and the world's overwhelming response to it.

Originally published for the fiftieth anniversary of the flight, Gill did not intend to write a standard biography of Lindbergh: rather, Gill attempted to describe an unknown young man at one moment in history, and to examine the forces that led him to act as he did. The 1920s were a period that sought out heroes and worshipped them extravagantly: few heroes were so unlike the age that fostered them as this "unheralded boy" of twenty-five. A shy man, bold hearted and firm of purpose, the Lindbergh we come to know in Gill's book is one whose intelligence and strength of will enabled him, through a single, superb act, to become perhaps the most celebrated figure of his time.