11 What books or plays have been written about scientists?
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This article is from the Books FAQ, by Evelyn C. Leeper eleeper@jaguar.stc.lucent.com with numerous contributions by others.
11 What books or plays have been written about scientists?
(Given that science fiction would expand this list beyond the disk limits
of most systems, this question is restricted to non-SF only.)
Plays or theatrical performances:
Albee, Edward: WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (biologist)
Bentley, Eric: THE RECANTATION OF GALILEI GALILEO--SCENES TAKEN FROM
HISTORY PERHAPS
Brecht, Bertolt: GALILEO
Bronowski, Jacob: THE FACE OF VIOLENCE
Darion, Joe and Ezra Laderman: THE TRIALS OF GALILEO (opera)
Duerenmatt,Friedrich: THE PHYSICISTS (physicists in an insane asylum)
Eisenberg, Mike: HACKERS (computer scientists)
Emanuel, Gabriel: EINSTEIN: A PLAY IN TWO ACTS
Esst, Garrison: UNCERTAINITY (Einstein and Heisenberg)
Heimel, Cynthia: A GIRL'S GUIDE TO CHAOS
Ibsen, Henrik: AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (although main character is a doctor)
Johnson, Terry: INSIGNIFICANCE (Einstein and Marilyn Monroe)
Kaiser, Georg, THE GAS TRILOGY
Kingsley, Sidney: MEN IN WHITE (1930s Pulitzer-prize winning play about a
young/old doctor)
Kipphardt, Heinar: IN THE MATTER OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER
Leonard, Jim: GRAY'S ANATOMY (about a MD who has to deal with contaminated
water that kills off a town)
MacLeish, Archibald: HERAKLES (a play in verse about the power of
scientists--that of a god--and the meagerness of their imagination)
Mighton, John: SCIENTIFIC AMERICANS (physicist and computer scientist)
Rice, Elmer: THE ADDING MACHINE
Schenkar, Joan: FULFILLING KOCH'S POSTULATES (microbiology)
Shadwell, Thomas: THE VIRTUOSO (late 1600s parody of the Royal Society)
Socolow, Elizabeth: LAUGHING AT GRAVITY: CONVERSATIONS WITH ISAAC NEWTON
(poetry)
Stavis, Barrie: LAMP AT MIDNIGHT (1940s, about Galileo)
Stoppard, Tom: HAPGOOD (physicist)
Stoppard, Tom: ? (about Stephen Hawking)
Whitemore, Hugh: BREAKING THE CODE (about Alan Turing)
Williams, William Carlos: various short stories about doctors
Wilson, Robert: EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH
Wilson, Robert: THE LIFE OF SIGMUND FREUD (?)
?: PARTICULAR MEN (about J. Robert Oppenheimer)
?, PICK UP AX (engineers and engineering managers)
Novels:
Asimov, Isaac: A WHIFF OF DEATH
Banville, John: DOCTOR COPERNICUS
Baring, Maurice: CAT'S CRADLE
Borges, Jorge Luis: short story in LABYRINTHS about Averroes
Boyd, William: BRAZZAVILLE BEACH (mathematician and social biologists)
Brod, Max: THE REDEMPTION OF TYCHO BRAHE (astronomers Brahe and Kepler)
Chekhov, Anton: (many stories with doctors)
DeLillo, Don: RATNER'S STAR
Djerrasi, Carl: CANTOR'S DILEMMA
Levi, Primo: (several semi-autobiographical books)
Lewis, Sinclair: ARROWSMITH
McCormmach, Russel: NIGHT THOUGHTS OF A CLASSICAL PHYSICIST
(professor of physics)
Powers, Richard: THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS
Pynchon, Thomas: GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
Pynchon, Thomas: V.
Rand, Ayn: ATLAS SHRUGGED (physicists)
Rosenthal, Erik: THE CALCULUS OF MURDER
Rosenthal, Erik: ADVANCED CALCULUS OF MURDER
Shute, Nevil: NO HIGHWAY (structural engineering)
Smith, Kaye Nolte: MINDSPELL (genetic engineering)
Snow, C. P.: THE NEW MEN (building the British atom bomb)
Snow, C. P.: THE SEARCH
Stone, Irving: THE ORIGIN (a biographical novel of Charles Darwin)
Trollope, Anthony: THE CLAVERINGS (engineers)
Thomas, Walter Keith and Warren U. Ober: A MIND FOR EVER VOYAGING:
WORDSWORTH AT WORK PORTRAYING NEWTON AND SCIENCE
Wibberly, Leonard: THE MOUSE THAT ROARED
Yourcenar, Marguerite: THE BLACK WORK
Short stories:
Chappell, Fred: "Ladies from Lapland" (about Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis)
Chappell, Fred: "Linnaeus Forgets"
Chappell, Fred: "The Snow That Is Nothing in the Triangle"
(about Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach)
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