I took a William Faulkner/Toni Morrison course back in college that has stuck with me for 20+ years–we read 5 by each author which led to some very cool and unexpected resonance and conversation. Two books that I remember fitting very well were Light in August and Song of Solomon.
I also just read American Prometheus and loved it, while my mom read the other Oppenheimer biography from Ray Monk. I was really curious about the cajones Monk had to write his biography in the massive shadow of Prometheus. It is by far the established biography, but Monk makes a strong case for his own–that he focuses on Oppie’s significant contributions to physics, which Prometheus mostly disregards, focusing instead on his diminishing returns as a manager. Prometheus is a fantastic book, but talking about the Monk made me turn a more critical eye to the ways it may have pigeon-holed Oppie too simplistically.
I’d love to hear what other pairings of either author or books y’all may have!
Ok here me out on this: Andrea Dworkin and Valerie Solanas. Both suffered lifelong sexual abuse, were college-educated survival-sex-workers, who considered their manuscripts to be their life’s passion. If you read “The SCUM Manifesto” and “Up Your Ass!”, it’s basically the lifestyle outlines in Dworkin’s semi-autobiographical novel “Ice and Fire”. Both were driven by a fire to see their work published that was often thwarted. But whereas Solanas was self-serving in her pursuit of notoriety and more than a bit hampered by mental illness, Dworkin was fixated on helping other women.
Just thought it was interesting to see how Dworkin can live the same life of an artist and survival-sex-worker, obsessed with writing about capitalism and the patriarchy, and be such a different person. Solanas is like Dworkin through a scary fun house mirror. She is, however, a lot funnier.