The #1 New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer was the inspiration for the blockbuster film OPPENHEIMER, and is now adapted for young readers. This brand-new edition introduces the next generation to one of the twentieth century's most iconic and complex global figures. J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist who led the American effort to build the atomic bomb during World War II, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of the revolutionary weapon he helped create. Readers of all ages will witness the rise and fall of a scientific and historical icon in this masterful new edition. Exploring his childhood, his secret work on the bomb, his central role in the Cold War, and his tragic downfall, this quintessential biography is history at its finest, riveting and deeply informative, and now available to a younger audience.
Authors
Kai Bird is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, best known for his biographies of political figures. He has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography, the Duff Cooper Prize, a Woodrow Wilson Center Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a Contributing Editor of The Nation magazine. Bird was born in 1951. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and he spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo and Bombay. He finished high school in 1969 at Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu, South India. He received his BA from Carleton College in 1973 and a M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University in 1975. Bird now lives in Miami Beach, Florida with his wife, Susan Goldmark, and their son, Joshua.
Martin J. Sherwin was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian whose scholarship focused on the history of the development of atomic energy and nuclear proliferation. Sherwin received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was the long-time Walter S. Dickson professor of English and American history at Tufts University until his assumption of emeritus status in May 2007. He was also a University Professor at George Mason University. He received numerous awards and grants besides those listed here. He and co-author Kai Bird shared the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2006, for their book entitled American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
