Outgoing, funny, and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic. Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. He’d done plenty of research — an extraordinary amount, actually, amassing some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and F.B.I. But Cameron, who had published Sherwin’s first book at Knopf — and who, like Oppenheimer, had been a victim of McCarthyism — insisted. So on March 13, 1980, Sherwin signed a $70,000 contract with Knopf for the project.

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Persons: Martin Sherwin, Sherwin, J, Robert Oppenheimer, he’d, Angus Cameron, Oppenheimer, Cameron, Knopf —, — Organizations: Knopf