Book Review: The Steep Ascent, a novel by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1944)

The paperback cover of The Steep Ascent. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The Steep Ascent, published in 1944, was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s first novel. Her first two books North to the Orient and Listen! The Wind had been non-fiction accounts of flights with her husband, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. Morrow Lindbergh also unfortunately published a short book in 1940 titled The Wave of the Future, a defense of American non-intervention in World War II that didn’t really renounce fascism.  

The Steep Ascent was apparently based on a real incident during a flight the Lindberghs took over the Alps. I can’t help but wonder if Morrow Lindbergh’s decision to turn the flight into a novel was informed by the unpopularity of Charles and Anne’s embrace of isolationism. As World War II dragged on, I doubt there were people clamoring to read any non-fiction by either Lindbergh. Framing the story as a novel and setting it in the pre-World War II era was perhaps an attempt to make the book less tied to current events.  

It’s always a curious experience to read a novel that you know is very closely connected to real life. It’s hard not to see the characters of “Eve” and “Gerald” as the real people Anne and Charles. Morrow Lindbergh does make a slight attempt to differentiate Gerald from Charles, as Gerald is British. But when we read about the resentment Eve has towards Gerald when they follow the wrong valley in the Alps, it's easy to think that it’s actually Anne’s resentment towards Charles.  

Morrow Lindbergh was an excellent writer, and there are excellent passages throughout The Steep Ascent. As frustrated as Eve is about packing for their journey, she realizes that if Gerald ordered her to stay behind, “Why—all the delicate structure of their marriage would tumble, like those glasses that are shattered, without a human hand touching them, by a single note ringing at precisely the right vibration.” (p.23)  

There are excellent descriptive passages about flying throughout the novel, as you might expect, given the extent of Morrow Lindbergh’s experiences with flight. One of my favorite passages was this one about taking off: “There comes a moment in a take-off, long before the wheels leave the ground, when you know you are going to get off. It is as though at some indefinable point the plane shifts its allegiance from earth to sky.” (p.47) 

There are lots of spiritual and Biblical allusions throughout The Steep Ascent, perhaps a foretelling of Morrow Lindbergh’s most famous book, Gift from the Sea, published in 1955.  

Because Eve can’t communicate very easily with Gerald, thanks to the roar of the plane’s engine, nearly all of the novel takes place within her stream of consciousness. I really liked this beautiful passage: “To appreciate life, Eve was beginning to realize vaguely, you must take it at all its levels; at its top crust, at its middle everyday layer, and then at some deeper inner core she wasn’t quite sure of and couldn’t analyze and had only felt once or twice in her life, in great moments.” (p.64)  

Morrow Lindbergh started writing the novel in late 1942. She wrote in her diary entry for November 17, 1942: “I find it is quite painful to push open that inner door. It is not that the experiences then were painful nor yet that they were so happy that I look back with too much longing on them. It’s just that I feel it—life—so vividly, almost more vividly than I did then, and its very vividness is a kind of anguish.” (War Within and Without, p.270-1) So it often goes for artists, who feel so deeply.  

In her diary entry for February 4, 1944, Anne is faced with bad news: “C has seen Harcourt, Brace, who report that the Book-of-the-Month Club has turned down my book—apparently because they have received a number of fanatical letters saying that if the club took my book they’d resign...Harcourt, Brace has planned a 25,000 first edition (half of what the first edition of Listen! The Wind was.)” (War Within and Without, p.361) This shows us the very real difference between the world of 1938 and 1944, and how public perception of the Lindberghs had shifted greatly during that time.  

The Steep Ascent is an interesting little book, at 128 pages it’s really more of a novella length, but worth reading for people interested in the Lindberghs.   

Book Review: The Wave of the Future: a Confession of Faith, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1940)

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of aviator Charles Lindbergh, was a noted author in her own right. Her most famous book is 1955’s Gift from the Sea, a volume of essays using seashells as metaphors for life. Her first two books, North to the Orient (1935) and Listen! The Wind (1938) chronicled flying expeditions taken with her husband and both books were best-sellers. Morrow Lindbergh was Charles’ aviator on these expeditions, and an integral part of the journey, as the Lindberghs flew in two-seater planes. Her third book, a slim 40-page pamphlet titled The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith, was published in the fall of 1940. The book also sold well, but it was nothing like her previous two books. From the title, you might think the book had something to do with the future of air travel, or airplane technology. The Wave of the Future was an examination of the state of the world in the fall of 1940, and an argument in favor of the United States staying out of World War II, which had been raging for a year in Europe.  

The Wave of the Future is a bizarre little book, and it’s one of those books that could easily have just remained as a long magazine article, rather than a full-blown book. I was able to read it for free online, thanks to the Internet Archive. The book is weirdly defeatist about America combating fascism, as Morrow Lindbergh writes “There is no fighting the wave of the future.” (p.34)  

A few pages later, she writes “Might not a course be found which took advantage of, rather than opposed, the great forces pushing in the world? The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.” (p.37) Morrow Lindbergh isn’t quite arguing for fascism in America, but she’s also not totally condemning it, either. It’s a very weird ideological needle she’s trying to thread in her argument.  

Morrow Lindbergh groups together the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany as what she calls “the Forces of the Future.” She writes: “I am not here defending the forms this revolution has taken: aggression, terror, class or race persecution. I oppose these as deeply as any American...I cannot see this war, then, simply and purely as a struggle between the ‘Forces of Good’ and the ‘Forces of Evil.’ If I could simplify it into a phrase at all, it would seem truer to say that the ‘Forces of the Past’ are fighting against the ‘Forces of the Future.’” (p.17-18) It’s good that Morrow Lindbergh is against “aggression, terror, class or race persecution,” but she is oddly unable, or unwilling, to more broadly condemn fascism or communism as systems of government. She also doesn’t seem to understand that the United States might have to fight against these forces in the future. She wants to separate “the scum on the wave of the future” from the rest of the wave, but there’s no separating the scum from the wave with fascism or totalitarianism. 

Morrow Lindbergh is advocating for a weirdly nonspecific change in America. “We might be able to meet the new world order without the violence we abhor—if only we could open our eyes to our present failings and admit our problems.” (p.37) Sure, America had plenty of problems in 1940, like racism, sexism, you name it—but Morrow Lindbergh doesn’t write about any of these issues.  

The strangest passage in The Wave of the Future is a section where Morrow Lindbergh writes: “Our answer should not and will not be the answer of any European nation...It should be as American as the white steeples of New England or the skyscrapers of New York; as American as a boy’s slang, as backyard life in small towns, as baseball and blue jeans.” (p.26) Again, she’s not quite advocating for fascism in America, but she’s also not condemning fascism, so what on earth does she mean? I have no idea, and I’m not sure she knew the answer either.  

In a letter written to her mother on September 4, 1940, Morrow Lindbergh writes of the book: “I feel, of course, almost impelled to write it, because of my personal loyalty and desperate feeling of injustice to C {Charles} but I wouldn’t do it on that alone. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t feel convinced of his integrity and the integrity of his stand (whether or not I agree with the details and whether or not I agree with the presentation).” (War Within and Without, p.127)  

That quote really says it all, that Anne wrote the book to defend Charles’ position, even if she didn’t completely agree with it herself.  I don’t think that’s a good reason to write a book. Let Charles write his own book about isolationism and non-intervention. The quote also highlights the fact that since Anne herself was not necessarily passionate about the details of her philosophical argument, it might not have been rigorously thought out.  

In the index of War Within and Without, a 1980 collection of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s letters and diaries from 1939-1944, there are 12 entries under The Wave of the Future for “criticism of,” which gives us an idea of the intense criticism that greeted the book upon its release.  

It’s impossible to separate The Wave of the Future from Charles Lindbergh’s views on American neutrality, non-intervention, fascism, and the Nazis. Lindbergh was a staunch believer in eugenics, and he was clearly a Nazi sympathizer. The Lindberghs were actually looking for a house in Berlin in the fall of 1938. Then Kristallnacht happened and Lindbergh thought better of moving to Germany. But for whatever reason, Lindbergh was never able to repudiate the Nazis with the force that he should have.  

The Wave of the Future was written just as Charles Lindbergh was starting to speak more publicly about the war as part of the America First Committee. Charles’ involvement with America First took him around the United States, making speeches about the need for the United States to remain neutral and remain uninvolved in the war. For a man who valued his privacy so much, it was curious that he chose to be so public in his political activities.  

Lindbergh gave a notorious speech in Des Moines on September 11, 1941, where he resorted to antisemitic stereotypes, saying that the Jews controlled the U.S. news media, and were one of the groups pushing for the U.S. to enter the war.  The backlash was fierce and immediate against Lindbergh’s speech. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the America First Committee sputtered into oblivion. Lindbergh ended up taking part in air raids and combat missions in the Pacific theater in 1944, as a civilian. (Lindbergh had resigned his commission in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve in April of 1941, and when the U.S. entered the war, FDR refused to take Lindbergh back.)  

It’s so curious to think about smart people, like the Lindberghs, who were not able to see the dangers that fascism posed to the United States. But then again, we’re living in an era now where Americans need to be reminded that the Nazis were the bad guys in World War II. If people in 2025 can’t understand the dangers of Nazism, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that people in 1940 couldn’t understand the dangers of Nazism as well.  

The Wave of the Future has never been reprinted since 1940, and it remains a curious oddity and blemish in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s bibliography. Fortunately, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote many more books, like the wonderful Gift from the Sea, that have securely established her literary reputation.