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.

Her marriage to Enrico put Laura in close contact with a circle of scientists who were deeply involved with uranium research. Fermi's special genius in the field was given formal recognition with the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938. The award came at a most opportune time for the Fermis, for it coincided with Mussolini's Manifesto della Razza. Since Laura was Jewish, the Fermis decided to leave Italy and in December 1938 they used the trip to Stockholm to receive the prize as their means of escape.

From Stockholm, Laura, Enrico, their daughter Nella (b. 1931), and their son Giulio (b. 1936) went to the United States, where Fermi accepted a position in the physics department at Columbia University. In 1941, Fermi was chosen as one of the scientists for the U.S. government's atomic bomb project. The family followed Enrico to Chicago, where he headed the team of scientists who achieved the first atomic chain reaction in 1942. In August 1944 the family again moved, this time to Los Alamos, New Mexico, for work on the atom bomb. It is at this point that the material in this collection begins.

Fermi's connections with the world of science, and atomic science in particular, provided her with much material for books and articles. Her career as a writer was launched with Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi (1954), which was published just before Enrico's death in November 1954. Although Fermi had become lionized, his wife wrote of him in the more simple terms of home and family. As Fermi said when approached by the University of Chicago Press to write this biography, "My husband is the man I cook for and iron shirts for. How can I take him that seriously?" (Saturday Review, May 4, 1957). Fermi's skill and charm as an author lies in her ability to write engagingly and perceptively on the human aspects of nuclear research. In Atoms for the World (1957), her informal account of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy held in Geneva in August 1955, and in numerous magazine articles, she deals with many of the broader issues raised by her husband's and his associates' work with nuclear power.

Fermi, as an emigré herself, was also interested in the experiences of others who had come from Europe to the U.S. In 1971, she published Illustrious Immigrants: the Intellectual Migration from Europe, in which she examines the impact of the migration of European intellectuals in the 1930s on American society. As part of the research for this book, Fermi corresponded with many emigré Europeans: she also interviewed many persons who were in a position to assess the impact of the migration. Although the interview notes are rough, special attention should be directed to the William McNeill, S. William Halperin, and Helena Gamer interviews, which contain estimates of the contributions A by the immigrants of the 1930s to the University of Chicago's departments of history, German, and art history.

From the guide to the Fermi, Laura. Papers, 1922-1977, (Special Collections Research Center University of Chicago Library 1100 East 57th Street Chicago, Illinois 60637 U.S.A.)