Putnam, George Palmer, 1887-1950

George Palmer Putnam (September 7, 1887 – January 4, 1950) was an American publisher, author and explorer. Known for his marriage to (and being the widower of) Amelia Earhart, he had also achieved fame as one of the most successful promoters in the United States during the 1930s.

George Palmer Putnam (September 7, 1887 – January 4, 1950) was an American publisher, author and explorer. Known for his marriage to (and being the widower of) Amelia Earhart, he had also achieved fame as one of the most successful promoters in the United States during the 1930s.
Early life

Born in Rye, New York, he was the son of John Bishop Putnam and the grandson of his namesake, George Palmer Putnam, founder of the prominent publishing firm that became G. P. Putnam's Sons. He studied at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1911, Putnam married Dorothy Binney (1888–1982), the daughter of Edwin Binney, inventor and co-owner, with cousin C. Harold Smith, of Binney & Smith Inc., the company that made Crayola crayons. They had two sons, David Binney Putnam (1913–1992) and George Palmer Putnam, Jr.(1921-2013), and for a time lived in Bend, Oregon, where Putnam was the publisher and editor of the local newspaper, the Bend Bulletin. He was mayor of Bend from 1912 to 1913. Putnam left Bend in 1915 to become the private secretary to Oregon Governor James Withycombe.

Within a few years, George and Dorothy moved to the East Coast, where Putnam entered the family publishing business in New York City.

During World War I, George Putnam served with the United States Army field artillery. In 1926, under the sponsorship of the American Museum of Natural History, he led an expedition to the Arctic, up the west coast of Greenland. The following year he headed another expedition for the American Geographical Society to collect wildlife specimens on Baffin Island. 1920s and 1930s business interests

In July 1927 Putnam was responsible for the blockbuster publication of "We", Charles Lindbergh's autobiographical account of his early life and his Orteig Prize winning non-stop transatlantic solo flight from New York to Paris in May of that year. The book was one of the most successful non-fiction titles of all time, selling more than 650,000 copies in less than a year and earning its author over $250,000, the 2017 equivalent of over $3.4 million USD.

In 1927, Putnam's wife, Dorothy Binney, traveled to South America and began a long, well-chronicled affair with George Weymouth, a man 19 years her junior; Putnam would leave Binney two years later. Many thought that George had left his first wife for Amelia Earhart, although for Binney, it was her own ticket out of an unhappy marriage.