✍The First Page: An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer's Life by Shirley Streshinsky and Patricia Klaus

 

An Atomic Love Story

by Shirley Streshinsky and Patricia Klaus

Nonfiction/History

 

Set against a dramatic backdrop of war, spies, and nuclear bombs, An Atomic Love Story unveils a vivid new view of a tumultuous era and one of its most important figures. In the early decades of the 20th century, three highly ambitious women found their way to the West Coast, where each was destined to collide with the young Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist whose work in creating the atomic bomb would forever impact modern history. His first and most intense love was for Jean Tatlock, though he married the tempestuous Kitty Harrison—both were members of the Communist Party—and was rumored to have had a scandalous affair with the brilliant Ruth Sherman Tolman, ten years his senior and the wife of another celebrated physicist. Although each were connected through their relationship to Oppenheimer, their experiences reflect important changes in the lives of American women in the 20th century: the conflict between career and marriage; the need for a woman to define herself independently; experimentation with sexuality; and the growth of career opportunities.

Beautifully written and superbly researched through a rich collection of firsthand accounts, this intimate portrait shares the tragedies, betrayals, and romances of an alluring man and three bold women, revealing how they pushed to the very forefront of social and cultural changes in a fascinating, volatile era.

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William Boyd, one of Robert’s housemates at Harvard, would remember the remark. Boyd’s own Scottish-German forebears would not have been on that iconic ship when it reached American shores in 1620 either, or on any of the other ships that followed soon after in the Winthrop Fleet, carrying English emigrants westward over the Atlantic at the beginning of what would come to be called the “Great Migration.” The ancestors of two other Harvard friends—John Edsall and Jeffries Wyman—had arrived on Massachusetts shores in the 1630s, however.
 

These early settlers in the New World were not the huddled masses that would wash westward from Europe two hundred years later, but strong-minded, God-fearing, typically prosperous and well-educated people who had left their native England seeking freedom to worship. 

 

These were the Puritans, supremely confident in their own superiority, who helped to establish a distinctive American character: a kind of rock-ribbed perseverance, a determination that would not falter. The hellfire and damnation they preached would also linger long in the
Puritan psyche, but would never be quite so deeply embedded as their belief in the spiritual value of good deeds and the ethics of hard work.

Shirley Streshinsky is a critically acclaimed author of three works of nonfiction and four historical novels. As a journalist and travel essayist, she has written extensively for a wide range of national magazines such as Glamour, Preservation, American Heritage, The American Scholar, and Conde Nast Traveler. She is the recipient of the Society of Magazine Writers’ Award for Excellence and the National Council for the Advancement of Education Writing award, and was cited by The Educational Press Association of America for “superlative achievement in features.” Her travel essays have been a feature on National Public Radio. She was married to the late photojournalist Ted Streshinsky and lives in Kensington (Berkeley), California.

Patricia Klaus is an independent scholar who attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, and then Stanford University where she earned a Ph.D. in Modern British History. She taught twentieth-century British history at Yale University, was a visiting lecturer at the University of Virginia and Stanford, and has written a number of historical articles. Her particular interests are women in nineteenth and twentieth century England as well as the study of war and literature, which made working on a book about the remarkable women of the Atomic Age especially appealing.