OPPENHEIMER’S PROFILE IN THE BIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL
Oppenheimer’s Profile in the Biographical Novel

Summary/Abstract: There is a lack of absolute consensus among literary critics in the polemics whether the biography is a literary genre: art or science, or maybe a hybrid genre. The present article focuses on the research of Julius Robert Oppenheimer’s profile in the prize-winner biographical novel, written by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. “The “father” of the atomic bomb” is presented in the book not only in a horizontal diachronic, chronologically ordered encyclopedic facts, but also from a bottom-up perspective of in-depth multi-aspectual analysis. This is not only a microhistory, but it uses Oppenheimer’s life story as a lens, microscope to that period in the history of America and overall the world. The solid theoretical research dedicated to the creation of the book, 25 years of work with archive documents, recorded interviews, testimonies of witnesses, are proving that the biographical novel is evidence-based, meets the principle of verifiability. However, unlike the other 30 biographies on the theoretical physicist Oppenheimer previously written, this impressive work is literary by excellence. The title of the work evocatively suggests that the protagonist is a mythical national hero. The focus is on the polymath intellectual, scientist, academic, statesman, manager of a grandiose top-secret project, but also a romantic man who loved literature, who read Marcel Proust as a psychotherapeutic solution, wrote poetry, learnt languages, and philosophy. The metafiction strategy brings first-hand evidence to judge, testimony within the texture of fiction, Oppies’s poem - his energy and temperament, the very specific conceptual metaphors and symbolism, the intricacies of his own and his time’s moral dilemmas. The biopic movie based on this biographical novel, indeed brings the super-human actor-agent back on stage.

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