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Richard Rhodes was thirteen months old when his mother died, and he spent part of his boyhood in the Andrew Drumm Institute, a boys’ home in Independence, Missouri, after he and his brother were removed from an abusive stepmother. He went on to Yale, wrote four novels, and then spent years on one subject: The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), an 886-page history that won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Three more volumes followed on the hydrogen bomb, the arms race and the end of the Cold War. Between them he wrote about a Missouri farm, a criminologist, the SS killing squads, John James Audubon and Hedy Lamarr. This guide covers his 14 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 key books · 1973–2021 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Richard Rhodes’s best-known book is The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. It is the first of four nuclear histories, followed by Dark Sun (1995), Arsenals of Folly (2007) and The Twilight of the Bombs (2010). Start with The Making of the Atomic Bomb; read on for his memoir, his books on violence and his biographies.
Where to Start with Richard Rhodes
If you want his defining book
→ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) — the scientists, the Manhattan Project and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If you want the story of the Cold War
→ Dark Sun (1995) — the sequel, about the hydrogen bomb and Soviet espionage.
If you want something shorter
→ Hedy’s Folly (2011) — the film star who patented an invention.
If you want his most personal book
→ A Hole in the World (1990) — his own childhood, told without self-pity.
14 Richard Rhodes Books, in Order
The Ungodly
A historical novel about the Donner Party, the emigrant wagon train trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846–47. It is the first of his four novels, and the only one still in print: Stanford University Press reissued it in 2007.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
A history of the atomic bomb from the physics of the early twentieth century to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, told through the people involved, from Leo Szilard, Niels Bohr and Lise Meitner to J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves. It also won the National Book Award (1987) and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The physicist I. I. Rabi called it “an epic worthy of Milton”; some historians found it too light on institutions.
A Hole in the World
His memoir of growing up in Kansas City after his mother’s suicide in 1938: a father who worked as a railroad boilermaker, a stepmother who starved and abused him and his brother Stanley, and the day Stanley went to the police. It ends with the two boys at the Andrew Drumm Institute, the boys’ home where both finished high school.
Dark Sun
The sequel, from the Soviet atomic spies of the 1940s to the first American hydrogen bomb test in 1952, with the Soviet bomb programme, Edward Teller and the fall of Oppenheimer. It was a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in History, and Publishers Weekly named it one of the best books of 1995.
Deadly Feasts
An account of the prion diseases, from kuru among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea to mad cow disease in Britain and its human form, written as the British beef crisis was unfolding in the mid-1990s.
Why They Kill
The work of the criminologist Lonnie Athens, who interviewed violent offenders and argued that violent people are made through a sequence of brutal experiences rather than born. A documentary of the same name, directed by Giuseppe M. Fazari, followed in 2017.
Masters of Death
A history of the SS mobile killing units that followed the German army into the Soviet Union in 1941 and shot more than a million people, most of them Jews, before the death camps were in full operation. Rhodes draws on the units’ own reports and on the testimony at their trials.
John James Audubon
A biography of the bird painter, from his birth in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and youth in France to his years on the American frontier and the publication of The Birds of America. Rhodes followed it with an edition of Audubon’s writings, The Audubon Reader (2006).
Arsenals of Folly
The third nuclear volume follows the arms race from the 1950s to the end of the Cold War, centred on the 1986 meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, where the two came close to agreeing to abolish nuclear weapons. Rhodes later wrote a play, Reykjavik, about the summit.
The Twilight of the Bombs
The last of the four nuclear histories covers the years after the Soviet collapse: securing the former Soviet arsenal, the weapons inspections in Iraq, South Africa giving up its bombs, and the programmes of North Korea and Pakistan.
Hedy’s Folly
How the Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr and the composer George Antheil came up with frequency hopping, a way of steering a torpedo by radio that they patented in 1942 and that is often cited as a forerunner of modern wireless technology.
Hell and Good Company
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) seen through the writers, artists, doctors and nurses who went there, including Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and Pablo Picasso, whose Guernica answered the bombing of the town in 1937. Rhodes is particularly interested in the medical advances the war forced, such as blood banks.
Energy
Four centuries of how people have powered their lives, from the wood shortages of Elizabethan England through coal, steam, oil and electricity to nuclear power and renewables, told through the inventors, engineers and businessmen behind each change.
Scientist
A biography of the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, from his Alabama boyhood to his work on ants, island biogeography and sociobiology and the fierce arguments that followed it. It was published weeks before Wilson’s death in December 2021.
In What Order to Read Richard Rhodes
The four nuclear histories are best read in order: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun, Arsenals of Folly and The Twilight of the Bombs. Each stands on its own, but together they run from the discovery of fission to the years after the Cold War. Everything else can be read by subject.
If 886 pages is too much to start with, try one of the shorter books first, such as Hedy’s Folly or Why They Kill, and come back to the nuclear books once you know how he tells a story.
A reading path
1. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986)
2. A Hole in the World (1990)
3. Dark Sun (1995)
4. Hell and Good Company (2015)
5. Energy (2018)
Everything Else Richard Rhodes Published
Beyond the 14 key books: 12 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Novels
3
3 books · 1978–1981
- 1978Holy Secretshis second novel
- 1980The Last Safarihis third novel
- 1981Sons of Earthhis fourth novel
Nonfiction
9
9 books · 1970–1999
- 1970The Inland Groundan evocation of the American Middle West, his first book
- 1974The Ozarkson the Ozark mountains
- 1979Looking for Americaa writer’s odyssey, collected journalism
- 1989Farma year in the life of an American farm family
- 1992Making Lovean erotic odyssey, a memoir
- 1993Nuclear Renewalcommon sense about nuclear energy
- 1995How to Writeadvice and reflections on the craft
- 1996Trying to Get Some Dignitystories of triumph over childhood abuse, with Ginger Rhodes
- 1999Visions of Technologyan anthology he edited, a century of debate about machines
The years · 1937–2021
Quick facts about Richard Rhodes
- Known for
- Richard Rhodes is known for telling the history of nuclear weapons, from the first experiments to the end of the Cold War, as a human story with the scientists at its centre.
- Born
- 4 July 1937, Kansas City, Kansas
- Childhood
- His mother died in 1938; he grew up partly at the Andrew Drumm Institute, a boys’ home in Independence, Missouri
- Education
- Yale University, BA in intellectual history, 1959
- Worked
- Newsweek, Radio Free Europe, Hallmark Cards; contributing editor at Harper’s and Playboy
- Prizes
- Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for The Making of the Atomic Bomb
- Married
- The clinical psychologist Ginger Rhodes, his second wife
- Lives
- Above Half Moon Bay, California
The red mark is 1986: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the book that won him the Pulitzer Prize.
How Richard Rhodes Writes: History With a Novelist’s Eye
Rhodes wrote four novels before his big histories, and it shows. The Making of the Atomic Bomb opens not with a date or a definition but with a scene: Leo Szilard waiting for a traffic light in Bloomsbury and, as he crossed the street, seeing the idea that would change the century. He builds his histories from people in rooms, and explains the science only as far as a reader needs to follow what they did.
The research behind this is enormous. His histories rest on archives, memoirs and interviews; the four nuclear volumes together run to thousands of pages. He has said he prefers the word “verity” to “nonfiction” for this kind of book.
His subjects look scattered, but violence and what people do with it run through most of them: the bomb, the SS killing squads, the making of violent criminals, his own childhood. He wrote about the craft itself in How to Write (1995).
Watch
Richard Rhodes on the making of the atomic bomb
Dwarkesh Patel talks with Rhodes in May 2023 about Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, Soviet espionage and what the history of the bomb means today.
Frequently asked questions about Richard Rhodes’s books
How many books has Richard Rhodes written?
His own website counts twenty-six. This page lists 14 key books, from The Ungodly (1973) to Scientist (2021), and 12 others, including three more novels, his first book The Inland Ground (1970) and an anthology he edited.
What are Richard Rhodes’s books in order?
The Ungodly (1973), The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), A Hole in the World (1990), Dark Sun (1995), Deadly Feasts (1997), Why They Kill (1999), Masters of Death (2002), John James Audubon (2004), Arsenals of Folly (2007), The Twilight of the Bombs (2010), Hedy’s Folly (2011), Hell and Good Company (2015), Energy (2018) and Scientist (2021).
Where should I start with Richard Rhodes?
With The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It is long, but it is the book everything else in his career grows out of. If you want something shorter first, try Hedy’s Folly.
What is Richard Rhodes’s most famous book?
The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986). It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1988, the National Book Award in 1987 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In what order should I read his nuclear history books?
In publication order: The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Dark Sun (1995), Arsenals of Folly (2007) and The Twilight of the Bombs (2010). They follow the story from before the Second World War to the years after the Cold War.
Was the film Oppenheimer based on Richard Rhodes’s book?
No. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) was based on American Prometheus (2005) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Rhodes’s book covers much of the same history.
Has Richard Rhodes won a Pulitzer Prize?
Yes, once: the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Dark Sun was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1996.
Have any of his books been adapted?
Why They Kill became a documentary of the same name in 2017, directed by Giuseppe M. Fazari. He also wrote a play, Reykjavik, about the 1986 summit he covers in Arsenals of Folly.
Did Richard Rhodes write a memoir?
Yes. A Hole in the World (1990) is about his childhood: his mother’s suicide, the abuse he and his brother suffered from their stepmother, and their years in a boys’ home. He later wrote Trying to Get Some Dignity (1996) with his wife Ginger Rhodes, about other survivors of childhood abuse.
Is Richard Rhodes still alive?
Yes. He was born on 4 July 1937 in Kansas City, Kansas, and lives in California with his wife, Ginger Rhodes.
Footnotes
- Richard Rhodes — Wikipedia
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Wikipedia
- Finalist: Dark Sun — The Pulitzer Prizes
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Encyclopedia.com
- Richard Rhodes — official website
- Richard Rhodes — Dwarkesh Podcast, 2023
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change.”
— Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), the first line
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