San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
The monumental book behind ‘Oppenheimer’
‘American Prometheus,’ which took 25 years to write, inspired new film that opens Friday
Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic.
But by the late 1990s, he had to admit he was stuck.
Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. Now he wondered if he would ever finish it. He had done plenty of research — an extraordinary amount, actually, amassing about 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and FBI dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office. But he had barely written a word.
Sherwin had originally tried to turn the project down, his wife remembered, telling his editor, Angus Cameron, that he didn’t think he was seasoned enough to take on such a consequential subject as Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. But Cameron, who had published Sherwin’s first book at Knopf — and who, like Oppenheimer, had been a victim of Mccarthyism — insisted.
So, on March 13, 1980, Sherwin signed a $70,000 contract with Knopf for the project. Paid half to get started, he expected to finish it in five years.
In the end, the book took 25 years to write — and Sherwin didn’t do it alone.
When Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” is released on Friday, it will be the first time many younger Americans encounter the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But that film stands on the shoulders of the exhaustive and exhilarating 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography called “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” co-written by Sherwin and Kai Bird.
Knopf published this masterwork in 2005. But it was only thanks to a rare collaboration between two indefatigable writers — and a deep friendship, built around a shared dedication to the art of biography as a life’s work — that “American Prometheus” got done at all.
Oppenheimer would have been a daunting subject for any biographer. A public intellectual with a flair for the dramatic, he directed the top-secret lab at Los Alamos, N.M., taking the atomic bomb from theoretical possibility to terrifying reality in an impossibly short timeline. Later, he emerged as a kind of philosopher king of the postwar nuclear era, publicly opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb and becoming a symbol both of America’s technological genius and of its conscience.
Among the scores of people Sherwin also interviewed were Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer’s onetime best friend whose communist ties in part formed the basis of the inquisition against him, and Edward Teller, whose testimony at the 1954 hearing helped end his career.
Oppenheimer’s son, Peter, refused a formal interview, so Sherwin brought his family to the Pecos Wilderness near Santa Fe, saddled up a horse and rode to the Oppenheimers’ rustic cabin, wrangling a chance to talk to the scientist’s son as the two men built a fence.
“Marty never thought he was a great interviewer,” said Susan Sherwin, who accompanied him on many research trips, and survives him. But he had a knack for connecting with people.
Sherwin’s deadline came and went. His editor retired, and he did his best to avoid his new one. There was always another person to interview, or another document to read.
Bird, a former associate editor at The Nation, needed a job. It was 1999, and although Bird had written a couple of modestly successful biographies, as a 48-year-old historian without a doctorate, he was underqualified for a tenuretrack university position and overqualified for nearly everything else.
Bird was unsuccessfully applying for jobs at newspapers when he heard from an old friend. Sherwin took Bird out to dinner, and suggested they join forces on the Oppenheimer book.
Finally, with everyone on board, Gail Ross, Bird’s agent, negotiated a new contract with Knopf, which agreed to pay the pair an additional $290,000 to finish the book.
Sherwin cautioned Bird that there were gaps in his research. But soon, “untold numbers of boxes” started showing up at Bird’s home, according to his wife. As Bird began to sift through everything, he recognized how painstakingly detailed and dizzyingly broad Sherwin’s research was. “There were no gaps,” Bird remembered.
Their process took shape: Bird would pore over the research, synthesize it and produce a draft which he’d send to Sherwin, who would recognize what was missing, edit and rewrite, and return the copy to Bird. Soon, Sherwin was drafting as well. “We wrote furiously for four years,” Bird said.
On April 5, 2005, 25 years after Knopf committed to the project, Bird and Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” was published to enormous acclaim. Among its numerous accolades was the Pulitzer Prize for biography.
By the time the collaborators learned in September 2021 that Nolan planned to turn “American Prometheus” into a film, Sherwin was dying of cancer.
“Oppenheimer’s story is one of the most dramatic and complex that I’ve ever encountered,” Nolan said recently. “I don’t think I ever would have taken this on without Kai and Martin’s book.”