““How had I never heard of Lester Maitland? Five weeks after Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, Maitland flew nonstop from California to Hawaii, an astonishing feat of nerve, discipline, and navigation, then became one of the most famous pilots in America before slipping almost entirely from view. With Stone Age Astronaut, Liam Callanan has written the kind of story I love most: a deeply researched, beautifully told resurrection of a vanished American life, and a moving portrait of survival and reinvention.””
A soaring adventure, a riveting biography, and a reclamation of a great American story lost to history.
In Stone Age Astronaut, award-winning author Liam Callanan uncovers the astonishing life of Lester Maitland—the Milwaukee-born aviator who, in 1927, became the first person to fly to Hawaii, earning national acclaim on par with Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic triumph. For a brief moment, the two men shared headlines, White House invitations, and fame. But while Lindbergh’s legacy grew, Maitland’s all but vanished.
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Callanan brings Maitland back into the spotlight, tracing his meteoric early career: flight instructor at nineteen; one of the US Army’s first test pilots; the first American to fly faster than 200 mph; and the pioneering airman whose Pacific crossing earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Just twenty-two days after becoming Executive Officer of the Far East Air Service Command—and one day after Pearl Harbor—Maitland witnessed the destruction of much of the Far East Air Force in the Philippines. Later, he commanded the 386th Bomb Group in Europe, making him World War II’s oldest bomber pilot, only to be abruptly and mysteriously retired weeks before D-Day. After the war, Maitland experienced a series of professional and personal disappointments, and he quietly faded into obscurity. He eventually became an Episcopal priest, serving small parishes far from the glamour of his early days in the cockpit.
The pages of Stone Age Astronaut (Maitland’s late-in-life nickname) hum with the tension and excitement of early aviation, rendered in a richly detailed narrative and Callanan’s research—spanning archives, newspapers, interviews, and travel to key sites—to reveal the remarkable sweep of Lester Maitland’s world. Along the way, readers encounter a constellation of notable figures: Amelia Earhart, Billy Mitchell, Ernest Hemingway, Gerald Ford, Richard Bong, the Dole Pineapple King, Harry Houdini, and even a Skull and Bones–affiliated aviation official.
With sparkling prose and a storyteller’s instinct for detail, Callanan resurrects a man whose life intersected with major events, eras, and personalities—but who has inexplicably slipped through the cracks of American memory.
A gripping portrait of ambition, innovation, fame, failure, and reinvention—and the enduring human urge to fly—Stone Age Astronaut ensures that Lester Maitland’s extraordinary story will no longer be forgotten.
“Brilliantly written, passionately researched, and propulsively paced, Stone Age Astronaut exhumes and illuminates the wild story of Lester Maitland, a tale of adventure, audacity, heartbreak, and renewal that somehow slipped between the cracks of history. In Callanan’s capable hands, Maitland’s story itself seems to defy gravity even as it gathers it, becoming a profound meditation on obsession, glory, legacy, and the ways in which one’s life and actions—however seemingly forgotten—can impact (in Callanan’s words) ‘a remarkable litany of lives.’”