The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica

Presented by journalist and author Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Lecture begins at 7:00 PM

FREE for Members; $5 for guests

It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over. American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet’s final frontier? Everyone wanted in on the adventure. Rockefellers and Vanderbilts begged to go along as mess boys. Newspapers across the globe covered the mission’s planning stage. And then, the night before the expedition’s flagship set off, Billy Gawronski—a mischievous, first-generation New York City high schooler, desperate to escape a dreary future in the family upholstery business—jumped into the Hudson River and snuck aboard. Could he get away with it?

Meet journalist and documentary filmmaker Laurie Gwen Shapiro as she takes readers on the “novelistic” (The New Yorker) and unforgettable voyage of a plucky teen who became a Roaring Twenties celebrity. This Indie Next selection, The Stowaway, is her first non-fiction book.

(Photograph by  Franco Vogt)