1. Jean Frances Tatlock was an American psychiatrist.
27 Facts About Jean Tatlock
1. 2.
Jean Tatlock was a member of the Communist Party USA and was a reporter and writer for the party's publication Western Worker.
3.
Jean Tatlock is known for her romantic relationship with J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.
4.
The daughter of John Strong Perry Tatlock, a prominent Old English philologist and an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer, Tatlock was a graduate of Vassar College and the Stanford Medical School, where she studied to become a psychiatrist.
5.
Jean Tatlock began seeing Oppenheimer in 1936, when she was a graduate student at Stanford and Oppenheimer was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.
6.
Jean Tatlock experienced clinical depression, and died by suicide on January 4,1944.
7.
Jean Frances Tatlock was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 21,1914, the second child of John Strong Perry Tatlock and Marjorie Fenton.
8.
Jean Tatlock had an older brother named Hugh, who became a physician.
9.
Jean Tatlock's father, who had a PhD from Harvard University, was a noted and acclaimed professor of English at the University of Michigan; an Old English philologist; an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer and English plays, poems, and Elizabethan literature; and author of approximately 60 books on those subjects, including The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and The Mind and Art of Chaucer.
10.
John Jean Tatlock was a professor of English at Stanford from 1915 to 1925, and Harvard from 1925 to 1929, before returning to the Bay Area as a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
11.
Jean Tatlock attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Williams College in Berkeley.
12.
Jean Tatlock was accepted into Stanford Medical School, then located in San Francisco, where she studied to become a psychiatrist.
13.
Jean Tatlock completed her internship at St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, and residency at the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Zion Hospital, now a campus of the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center, in San Francisco.
14.
Jean Tatlock is credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical politics during the late 1930s, and to people involved with, or sympathetic to, the Communist Party or related groups, such as Rudy Lambert and Thomas Addis.
15.
Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock spent the New Year together in 1941, and once met at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco.
16.
Oppenheimer's association with Jean Tatlock's friends was used as evidence against him during his 1954 security hearing.
17.
Jean Tatlock told me about her Communist Party memberships; they were on again, off again affairs, and never seemed to provide for her what she was seeking.
18.
Jean Tatlock loved this country and its people and its life.
19.
Jean Tatlock was, as it turned out, a friend of many fellow travelers and Communists, with a number of whom I was later to become acquainted.
20.
Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock went to a Mexican restaurant and spent the night together at her San Francisco apartment.
21.
Edith Arnstein Jenkins recalled a conversation with Mason Robertson, a good friend of Jean Tatlock's, in which he claimed Jean Tatlock had told him she was a lesbian.
22.
Jean Tatlock experienced clinical depression, and was being treated at Mount Zion.
23.
Jean Tatlock found her dead, lying on a pile of cushions in the bathroom, with her head submerged in the partly-filled bathtub.
24.
Jean Tatlock's father found her correspondence and sifted through it, burning letters and photographs in the fireplace.
25.
Jean Tatlock had introduced Oppenheimer to the poetry of John Donne, and it is widely believed he named the first test of a nuclear weapon "Trinity" in reference to one of Donne's poems, as a tribute to her.
26.
Jean Tatlock had taken some barbiturates, but not a fatal dose.
27.
Jean Tatlock was portrayed by Kate Harper in the 1980 TV miniseries Oppenheimer.