Mitchell A. Wilson
Personal Information
Description
Wilson became a professional writer in the 1940s while he was a research scientist, instructor, and doctoral candidate in Physics at Columbus University. Science, invention, and the ethical problems of modern atomic science are the subjects for some of his works. Finding his double-life too strenuous, he left academia and moved to Martha's Vineyard to become a full-time writer. He also wrote non-fiction on scientific matters for the general reader. In 1953, at the height of the cold war, he learned that his novel Live with Lightning had been translated into Russian and was selling well. In the Soviet Union and he was considered a major novelist, while in his native United States his was less widely heard-of. At the start of his career, he collaborated on a mystery novel "The Goose is Cooked" with Abraham Polonsky written under the joint pseudonym of Emmett Grogan. At his death, he was married to Stella Adler, the famous acting coach.
Books
Energy
Live with lightning, a novel
An unusually intelligent and sensitive novel depicting the career of a young nuclear physicist in the thirties and forties. He becomes involved in secret atomic energy research as part of the Manhattan Project, but does not work directly on the bomb, although he witnesses the Trinity Test. Postwar security obsessions are criticized, as well as the concentration of all atomic research on weapons rather than energy. --Paul Brians at public.wsu.edu.
The human body
Seesaws to cosmic rays
Introduces the principles of physics, describing the history, discovery, and application of the basic laws of physics by scientists who attempted to answer the curious questions of childhood.
American science and invention, a pictorial history
This is the story of American change; how the very nature of the Colonies determined a particular kind of science and invention; how this science and invention reacted on American life to change it; how this changed America made new and different demands on science and invention and was again changed, until after one hundred and seventy-five years of this interplay of action and reaction, of constant change, we find ourselves here today. We look at each other, some of us satisfied, some of us not, and wonder how we got that way. This book is my answer to that question -- Mitchell Wilson.