Richard Rhodes | |
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Richard Rhodes in 2004
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Born |
Kansas City, Kansas, United States |
July 4, 1937
Occupation | Writer, historian |
Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Yale University |
Period | 1970-present |
Genre | Contemporary history |
Spouse | Dr. Ginger Rhodes |
Website | |
www |
Richard Lee Rhodes (born July 4, 1937) is an American historian, journalist and author of both fiction and non-fiction (which he prefers to call "verity"), including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), and most recently, The Twilight of the Bombs (2010).
Rhodes has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among others. Rhodes is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also frequently gives lectures and talks on a broad range of subjects to various audiences, including testifying before the U.S. Senate on nuclear energy.
Richard Rhodes was born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1937. Following his mother's suicide on July 25, 1938, Rhodes and his older brother Stanley were raised in the Kansas City, Missouri area by his father, a railroad boilermaker with a third-grade education. When Rhodes was ten, their father remarried. The new wife starved, exploited, and abused the children. One day Stanley walked into a police station and reported their living conditions.
The brothers were removed from their father's custody and sent to the Andrew Drumm Institute, an institution for boys founded in 1928 in Independence, Missouri. The admission of the brothers was something of an anomaly as the institution was designed for orphaned or indigent boys and they fit neither category. The Drumm Institute is still in operation today, and now accepts both boys and girls. Rhodes became a member of the board of trustees in 1991. Rhodes wrote about his childhood in A Hole in the World.