Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "First to Fly" from Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961-1965 by Francis French and Colin Burgess with a foreword by Paul Haney:

"When venturing into the unknown, the first step taken is often the biggest and the boldest. A young Russian pilot named Yuri Gagarin took humankind’s first step into space. He died in his mid-thirties, so his image is fixed: a youthful icon symbolizing the first human journey above our planet. As President Lyndon B. Johnson wrote, “Yuri Gagarin’s courageous and pioneering flight into space opened new horizons and set a brilliant example for the spacemen of the two countries.”

Like many others who are remembered more for what they did than for who they were, Gagarin’s life was far more complicated than the smiling photos in the history books would have you believe. “Gagarin is often spoken of as if he were an absolutely straightforward and simple person,” his cosmonaut colleague Konstantin Feoktistov once said. “In fact, he was not at all as simple as it might seem at first glance.”

Gagarin’s life was tragically brief, yet he experienced more than most people ever will. His sudden and almost unprecedented fame brought its share of negative consequences, putting his basically honest and positive character through some severe tests. Yet he died while still trying to push his own personal development; despite numerous setbacks, he never gave up. It is not surprising that he had this strength of character considering he was lucky to survive his own childhood.

Anyone seeing the eleven-year-old Yuri Gagarin, just sixteen years before he made his historic spaceflight, would never imagine that he would be the one. The impish and mischievous young boy was a compulsive prankster, and his rudimentary schooling consisted of lessons culled from scavenged military maps and manuals left behind from a war that had devastated his homeland. It would scarcely have been possible to meet the ragged farm boy in 1945, living in a rural house made from the salvaged ruins of an earlier war-damaged home, and believe that in a few short years he would be flying a technological marvel. It would also have been difficult to imagine that his home country, shattered to the core by a ruinous war, could rise to such technological heights so quickly. Yet Gagarin and Russia pulled themselves out of the devastation and carried out one of mankind’s greatest achievements."