Janet Mabie was born in Boston, Mass., in 1893. She began her career as a journalist in 1915 with the Bridgeport Post-Telegram . Mabie was a featured special writer for the Christian Science Monitor in Boston (1919-28), then a staff writer until 1934. Her assignments for the Monitor included interviews with the Prince of Wales, Admiral Byrd, Charles Lindbergh, and the grandchildren of President Herbert Hoover. Mabie was author or coauthor of a number of books, including Heaven on Earth (1951), her childhood reminiscences of Northfield, Mass. and the evangelist D. L. Moody; and Fifty Years with the Golden Rule (1950), department store giant J.C. Penney's autobiography. After her marriage, she continued to be known professionally as Janet Mabie.
In 1928, Mabie met Amelia Earhart. She collaborated with Earhart on a number of writing projects until Earhart's disappearance in 1937. Mabie also collaborated with George Palmer Putnam, Earhart's husband, on a biography of Earhart entitled Soaring Wings . Their collaboration ended in controversy and Mabie began work on a biography of her own; Earhart's mother, Amy Otis Earhart, gave her encouragement and material. (See Amy Otis Earhart papers, MC 398, #112.) The original manuscript, "Lady in the High Winds," was rejected by Mabie's publisher, E.P. Dutton & Co., in 1945, and she began making major revisions. By 1959 she had retitled the revised manuscript "A Different Drummer." Health problems and working with J.C. Penney on View From the Ninth Decade (1960) postponed further work on the book indefinitely; it was never published. Mabie died in 1961.
From the guide to the Papers, 1912-1960, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)
