Oppenheimer’s Forgotten Biographer

The new movie “Oppenheimer” is based on the biography “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. But it has me thinking of my English professor Nuel Pharr Davis, an earlier biographer of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Davis was a faculty member at the University of Illinois. He spent most of the 1960s researching “Lawrence and Oppenheimer,” published in 1968, a year after Oppenheimer died. It was a prodigious work—involving interviews with 100 people who worked with both Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist.

The book was a National Book Award nonfiction finalist. I wonder if it might have been made into a film had Davis been a savvier promoter. He rarely mentioned it to his students, casually referencing on a few occasions “my book about making the bomb.”

I took several of his classes at Illinois in the 1970s and we became friends. Davis influenced my thinking about life in the classroom and in private conversations in his office. I met my wife of 45 years in one of his creative writing seminars. At the time I didn’t appreciate his journalism skills—his seven years of reviewing a plethora of government documents and tracking down people to interview.

Davis brought remarkable clarity and masterful technical description to a story complicated by its cast of characters—the physicists who with Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Enrico Fermi and other scientists and military personnel introduced the nuclear age with world-changing shock and awe.

In Davis’s telling, Oppenheimer was viewed by colleagues as an eclectic genius, a human computer, an encyclopedia of modern physics and related sciences. He became a postwar folk hero only to be severely discredited in the mid-1950s on allegations that he was a threat to national security.

Davis’s book portrayed Oppenheimer as a dedicated public servant who ultimately brought precision and management to the Los Alamos laboratory. Davis captured Oppenheimer’s self-absorption, saying he was most comfortable alone at a blackboard working on a theoretical physics problem. One of my favorite parts in Davis’s book is about a young Oppenheimer accidentally driving his car off the road more than once because he was preoccupied with solving an equation in his head.

Like Oppenheimer, Davis was a unique character. His literature classes were high entertainment. He might illustrate a point by creating his own sound effects with his voice or a squeaky chair. He wouldn’t hesitate to ask someone to sing a song to the rest of the class or do something embarrassingly theatrical. He could make stories by dead writers relevant, triggering mind-expanding introspection and empathy in his students.

Davis looked old beyond his years (late 50s) when I was a student. Like Oppenheimer, he was a heavy smoker. Sometimes I saw him walking to his campus office building with hunched shoulders, as if still carrying on his back the burden of producing a significant book. His death in 2001 at 85 was noted only by a three-sentence obituary in the local paper. But I’ll remember him when I see “Oppenheimer.”

Mr. Modzelewski is a business communications strategist and consultant in Chicago.