Feynman, Richard P.

In this playful letter to his mother, Feynman discusses how much he enjoyed seeing Shakespeare's Othello with Princeton physics professor Rudolf Ladenburg and his wife. Ladenburg, who held the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professorship of Physics at Princeton, had succeeded Karl Compton in that position, the man who was President of MIT when Feynman attended. Compton's youngest brother was the 1927 Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton (see lots 2 and 8).

Richard Feynman's autograph letter reads, in part:

"Dear Mom:

I was invited out today by one of the (older) Professors + his wife ⁠— Prof, Ladenburg ⁠— to see a play.

To your astonishment I liked the play. I thought it excellent, convincing, tense, realistic. The writer had the courage to let the villain carry thru all his evil deeds ⁠— to have the hero fall and not recover. Problems were not solved by ridiculous accidents at just the right moment.

[...]

I am going to get myself a copy of the play + read it. I missed many of the words + they were so well put together. I was impressed to not find the author's name on the program ⁠— it just appeared incidentally in a footnote ⁠— but you know now, as everyone else did (as well as I) that it was Shakespeare. It was "Othello" with Paul Robeson, and Jose Ferrer ⁠— I've only mentioned the best actors ⁠— the others were very good too."

RELATED LOTS:

See Lot 2 for the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Arthur Holly Compton, and Lot 8 for Richard P. Feynman's MIT Diploma signed by President of MIT Karl Compton