Historian Graff, whose book Watergate was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, spent an intense year writing The Devil Reached Toward the Sky (Avid Reader, Aug.), about the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the atomic bomb. The bestselling author of 10 books, who also hosts the Long Shadow podcast and writes the popular newsletter Doomsday Scenario, discusses the bomb’s legacy and explains why he likes messy history.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII. At this moment we effectively have every first-person memory that we’ll have of the war, and my goal was to tell those stories in the voices of the people who lived them. With my book, I tried to capture what it was like to learn the secrets of the atom and embark on the Manhattan Project at a moment when we didn’t know what would happen in the war. We didn’t know if Hitler would build a bomb first, or if the bomb would work at all.
The book is based on archival research and masterfully draws from a range of sources including memoirs, government reports, personal letters, testimonials, and more. How did you pull the material together?
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