A Dozen Favorite Novels About the Great Minds of History
(alphabetically by great mind)
Italo Calvino*: The Neighborhood by Gonçalo M. Tavares
Emily Dickinson: The Lady in White by Christian Bobin
Albert Einstein: Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
Federico García Lorca: The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell by Carlos Rojas
Werner Heisenberg**: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
Gottfried Leibniz: The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Herman Melville: Melville: A Novel by Jean Giono
Friedrich Nietzsche: When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom
Robert Oppenheimer***: Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
Pliny the Elder: Awake: Sublunar Visions and Temptations by Harald Voetmann
Alan Turing: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Saints and Scholars by Terry Eagleton
* and Roberto Juarroz, Karl Kraus, Henri Michaux, Paul Valéry, and Robert Walser
** and Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, and Erwin Schrödinger
*** and Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard
— August 16, 2022