American Prometheus

Kai Bird is a contributing editor at The Nation and the author of several biographies, including The Chairman, The Color of Truth, The Good Spy and The Outlier. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Writing Fellowship. Martin J. Sherwin was a Professor of History at George Mason University. His other books include A World Destroyed, winner of the Stuart L. Bernath and the American History Book prizes, and Gambling with Armageddon.

1: "He Received Every New Idea as Perfectly Beautiful" 2: "His Separate Prison" 3: "I Am Having a Pretty Bad Time" 4: "I Find Work Hard, Thank God, & Almost Pleasant" 5: "I Am Oppenheimer" 6: "Oppie" 7: "The Nim Nim Boys" 8: "In 1936 My Interests Began to Change" 9: "[Frank] Clipped It Out and Sent it In" 10: "More and More Surely" 11: "I'm Going to Marry a Friend of Yours, Steve" 12: "We Were Pulling the New Deal to the Left" 13: "The Coordinator of Rapid Rupture" 14: "The Chevalier Affair" 15: "He'd Become Very Patriotic" 16: "Too Much Secrecy" 17: "Oppenheimer Is Telling the Truth" 18: "Suicide, Motive Unknown" 19: "Would You Like to Adopt Her?" 20: Bohr Was God, and Oppie Was His Prophet" 21: "The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization" 22: "Now We're All Sons-of-Bitches" 23: "Those Poor Little People" 24: "I Feel I Have Blood on My Hands" 25: "People Could Destroy New York" 26: "Oppie Had a Rash and Is Now Immune" 27: "An Intellectual Hotel" 28: "He Couldn't Understand Why He Did It" 29: "I Am Sure That Is Why She Threw Things at Him" 30: "He Never Let On What His Opinion Was" 31: "Dark Words About Oppie" 32: "Scientist X" 33: "The Beast in the Jungle" 34: "It Looks Pretty Bad, Doesn't It?" 35: "I Fear That This Whole Thing Is a Piece of Idiocy" 36: "A Manifestation of Hysteria" 37: "A Black Mark on the Escutcheon of Our Country" 38: "I Can Still Feel the Warm Blood on My Hands" 39: "It Was Really Like a Never-Never-Land" 40: "It Should Have Been Done the Day After Trinity" Epilogue: "There's Only One Robert"