Chevalier, Haakon
Entry updated 23 October 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1901-1985) US author and translator from the French of many works; his career as a US university professor was destroyed by the House Unamerican Affairs Committee after 1950, and he emigrated to France where he worked as a translator. His novel The Man Who Would Be God (1959) was meant as a self-defence against the 1953 accusation that he had committed treason with Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the "father of the atomic bomb". Almost inadvertently, the tale creates a portrait of a nuclear physicist who wishes to save the world from itself, but whose idealism has not untypically transmogrified him into a Mad Scientist. [JC]
Haakon Maurice Chevalier
born Lakewood, New York: 10 September 1901
died Paris: 4 July 1985
works (selected)
- The Man Who Would Be God (New York: G P Putnam's Sons, 1959) [hb/]
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