In this Book
- Dinner in Camelot: The Night America's Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House
- Book
- 2018
- Published by: University Press of New England
summary
In April 1962, President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy hosted forty-nine Nobel Prize winners—along with many other prominent scientists, artists, and writers—at a famed White House dinner. Among the guests were J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was officially welcomed back to Washington after a stint in the political wilderness; Linus Pauling, who had picketed the White House that very afternoon; William and Rose Styron, who began a fifty-year friendship with the Kennedy family that night; James Baldwin, who would later discuss civil rights with Attorney General Robert Kennedy; Mary Welsh Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s widow, who sat next to the president and grilled him on Cuba policy; John Glenn, who had recently orbited the earth aboard Friendship 7; historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who argued with Ava Pauling at dinner; and many others. Actor Frederic March gave a public recitation after the meal, including some unpublished work of Hemingway’s that later became part of Islands in the Stream. Held at the height of the Cold War, the dinner symbolizes a time when intellectuals were esteemed, divergent viewpoints could be respectfully discussed at the highest level, and the great minds of an age might all dine together in the rarefied glamour of “the people’s house.”
Table of Contents
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- Foreword | Camelot
- pp. xi-xii
- Prologue | Heading to Dinner
- pp. 1-12
- One | America in Transition
- pp. 13-29
- Two | Camelot at Midpoint
- pp. 30-49
- Three | Poetry, Prose, and Politics
- pp. 50-65
- Five | Redemption and Promise
- pp. 86-100
- Six | Is That Linus Pauling?
- pp. 101-114
- Seven | “The Fire Next Time”
- pp. 115-127
- Eight | A Galaxy of Geniuses
- pp. 128-146
- Nine | An After-Party
- pp. 147-154
- Ten | Lives Connected
- pp. 155-173
- Epilogue | Nothing Like It Since
- pp. 174-184
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 185-186
Additional Information
ISBN
9781512602555
Related ISBN(s)
9781512600124
MARC Record
OCLC
1032589752
Pages
230
Launched on MUSE
2018-04-29
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2018