In the years between the historic first moon
landing by Apollo 11 on July 20,
1969, and his death at age 82 on August 25, 2012, Neil Armstrong received
hundreds of thousands of cards and letters from all over the world,
congratulating him, praising him, requesting pictures and autographs, and
asking him what must have seemed to him to be limitless—and occasionally
intrusive—questions. Of course, all the famous astronauts received fan mail,
but the sheer volume Armstrong had to deal with for more than four decades
after his moon landing was staggering.
Today, the preponderance of those letters—some 75,000 of them—are preserved in the archives at
Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Dear Neil Armstrong: Letters to the First Man on the Moon publishes
a careful sampling of these letters—roughly 400—reflecting the various kinds of
correspondence that Armstrong received along with representative samples of his
replies. Selected and edited by James R. Hansen, Armstrong’s authorized
biographer and author of the New York
Times best seller First Man: The Life
of Neil A. Armstrong, this collection sheds light on Armstrong’s enduring impact and offers an intimate glimpse into
the cultural meanings of human spaceflight. Readers will explore what the
thousands of letters to Neil Armstrong meant not only to those who wrote them, but
as a snapshot of one of humankind’s greatest achievements in the twentieth
century. They will see how societies and cultures projected their own meanings
onto one of the world’s great heroes and iconic figures.
