Richard Rhodes

American · born 1937

Richard Rhodes was born on July 4, 1937, in Kansas City, Kansas. His mother died by suicide when he was a year old, and after his father remarried, Richard and his older brother Stanley endured years of starvation and abuse at their stepmother's hands until Stanley walked into a Kansas City police station and reported it. The courts sent the boys to the Andrew Drumm Institute, a home for orphaned and indigent boys near Independence, Missouri, where Richard finished growing up and later served on the board of trustees. He won a scholarship to Yale, graduating with honors in 1959, and began publishing books in 1970 with The Inland Ground, an evocation of the American Midwest. He wrote The Making of the Atomic Bomb between 1981 and 1986, a nine-hundred-page account of the physicists who discovered nuclear fission and the wartime project that turned it into a weapon, ending with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987 and 1988, and Rhodes spent the following decades extending it into a four-volume history of the nuclear age, with Dark Sun, Arsenals of Folly, and The Twilight of the Bombs. He has also written biographies of the naturalist John James Audubon and the actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr, books on disease, violence, and energy, and a 1990 memoir of his own childhood, A Hole in the World. He has received grants from the Ford, Guggenheim, MacArthur, and Sloan Foundations and is an affiliate of Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. He lives in California with his wife, the writer Ginger Rhodes, with whom he co-authored a book about surviving childhood abuse.