Skip to main content

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Biography

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose writing has appeared in New York, Slate, Aeon, The Forward and the Los Angeles Review of Books. THE STOWAWAY is her first full-length work of nonfiction.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Books by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro - History, Nonfiction

It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over, and American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet’s final frontier? This was the moon landing before the 1960s. Everyone wanted to join the adventure. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts begged to be taken along as mess boys, and newspapers across the globe covered the planning’s every stage. The night before the expedition’s flagship launched, first generation New York City high schooler Billy Gawronski jumped into the Hudson River and snuck aboard. Could he get away with it?