Reeve Lindbergh

Reeve Morrow Lindbergh (born October 2, 1945) is an American author from Caledonia County, Vermont, who grew up in Darien, Connecticut as the daughter of aviator Charles Lindbergh (19021974) and author Anne Morrow Lindbergh (19062001). She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968.

Lindbergh writes of her experiences growing up in the household of her famous father – with echoes of his famous transatlantic flight and the kidnapping of her eldest brother, events which occurred years before she was born. In Two Lives (Brigantine Media; 2018), Lindbergh reflects on how she navigates her role as the public face of arguably "the most famous family of the twentieth century," while leading a "very quiet existence in rural Vermont."

Biography Reeve Lindbergh's parents, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were considered a "golden couple". Her father's famous solo, non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927 occurred 18 years before she was born. Hailed as a hero, Charles went on to marry the daughter of wealthy businessman Dwight Morrow, then serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico.

Later she would realize her parents were trying to protect for their children what had been taken from them. As she explains in Two Lives:

Lindbergh has been spared much of the intrusion of fame in her personal life. "If I'm introduced to somebody, often people will say, "Any relation?" she says. But, as she's "not recognized in person at all," she enjoys "a kind of freedom that (her) parents did not have."

When the phone in Passumpsic rang off the hook after news of her father's affairs hit, Lindbergh stated, "The Lindbergh family is treating this situation as a private matter, and has taken steps to open personal channels of communication, with sensitivity to all concerned." For her, this was another way of saying, "We don't know any more than you do, but we're trying to figure this out while causing as little pain as possible."

Vermont Lindbergh and her first husband, Richard Brown, moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Vermont, where they both taught school and had three children. In 1983 she published her autobiographical novel Moving to the Country, which Publishers Weekly called "comforting, hopeful, sensitively written, an honest and believable portrayal of marriage, change, and putting down roots."

Tragedy Their son, Jonathan, died of a seizure

Personal life

Reeve Lindbergh married her second husband, writer Nathaniel Wardwell Tripp (born 1944), on February 11, 1987, in Barnet, Vermont—the same day she divorced her first husband, Richard Brown. She and Tripp have a son. They also have two "gregarious and rambunctious dogs," Labrador Retrievers named Buster and Lola. Nearby Dwight Morrow High School, founded in 1932, was named for her grandfather, a businessman who famously served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico under Calvin Coolidge (1927–30).

Reeve's eldest brother, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the first of six children born to Charles and Anne Lindbergh, died in 1932 in a famous kidnapping — what many termed at the time "the crime of the century". Reeve's other Lindbergh siblings include aquanaut Jon Lindbergh (1932–2021), Land Morrow Lindbergh (born 1937), writer Anne Spencer Lindbergh (1940–1993), and conservationist Scott Lindbergh (born 1942), who raised rare monkeys in France. Reeve discovered later in life that her father had three other families in Germany and Switzerland.

Reeve's brother Land Morrow Lindbergh has been considered a possible model for the central character in French writer-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. The author visited the Lindbergh home in 1939, hoping to convince his fellow pilot, Charles Lindbergh, to urge Americans to enter the war against Nazi Germany. Unsuccessful in his primary objective, de Saint-Exupery became captivated by "Charles's golden-haired boy," Land Lindbergh. As a 76-year-old Montana rancher in 2014, the possible basis for this classic story could not be reached for comment. from 2015 until she stepped down as trustee in the summer of 2021.

Readings Lindbergh presented a live reading of her children's book, Nobody Owns the Sky, about Bessie Coleman, an early aviation pioneer, at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in December 2021.