Fermi, Laura.

Laura Capon Fermi (1907-1978), wife of Nobel laureate, Enrico Fermi, was a writer who took serious contemporary issues and attempted to make them understandable to a large, popular audience. In middle age, she achieved widespread recognition with her Atoms in the Family (1954), a biography of Enrico Fermi. After Atoms for the World (1957), she turned to a biography of Mussolini and then to a study of the effect of the movement of European intelligentsia to the United States during the 1930s.

Laura Capon was born in Rome, in 1907, one of four children in a family of assimilated Jews. Her father was an officer in the Italian Navy. When she was 16, Laura first met Enrico Fermi. She was not at first favorably impressed--his appearance she described as "queer," and she remarked that, "The young physicist had made no impression on me. Among my school friends there were boys who seemed more brilliant and promising to me." Two years later, in 1926, she met him again while on a summer vacation in the Dolomites. The companionship established during this summer continued at the University of Rome, where Laura was a student in general science and where Enrico had just been made a full professor of physics. Laura's initial negative impression changed, however, and they were married on July 19, 1928.

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