초록
영어
The American aviator-writers Ruth Rowland Nichols and Anne Morrow Lindbergh share many qualities: their background, their education, and their commitment to aviation. Each speaks of this commitment in works of fiction: Nichols in an unpublished novel, Sky Girl (1934), Lindbergh in the short novel, The Steep Ascent (1944). Their aims, however, are dramatically different. As they talk of the complex intersections of flight and life, Nichols sees aviation as sharing with the American West the power to shape the American national character, whereas Lindbergh sees it as a means to greater individual self-knowledge. Though their aims differ, their belief in the shaping power of aviation confirms the mythic role that aviation played for American citizens of the 1930s and early 1940s.