Dexter Wright Masters (June 15, 1909 – January 5, 1989), was an American editor and novelist who wrote extensively about the dangers of the atomic bomb.

Early life

Masters, a nephew of the poet

Edgar Lee Masters Edgar Lee Masters (August 23, 1868 – March 5, 1950) was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of ''Spoon River Anthology'', ''The New Star Chamber and Other Essays'', ''Songs and Satires'', ''The Great V ...

, was born in

Springfield, Illinois Springfield is the capital of the U.S. state of Illinois and the county seat and largest city of Sangamon County. The city's population was 114,394 at the 2020 census, which makes it the state's seventh most-populous city, the second largest o ...

, and studied at the University of Chicago.

Early career

After working for Time and Fortune magazines, he became the first editor of Tide, a marketing trade journal, age 22. During the Second World War, Masters served on the communications staff of the US Air Force, worked with several research laboratories including the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, for which he edited Radar, a classified publication.

Book on the atomic bomb

Masters co-edited with nuclear physicist

Katharine Way Katharine "Kay" Way (February 20, 1902 – December 9, 1995) was an American physicist best known for her work on the Nuclear Data Project. During World War II, she worked for the Manhattan Project at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago. She ...

(1903-1995) the 1946 New York Times bestseller ''One World or None: a Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb''. The book included essays by

Niels Bohr Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. B ...

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

, and

J. Robert Oppenheimer J. Robert Oppenheimer (; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist. A professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is often ...

, and sold over 100,000 copies. In 1955, Masters published a novel, ''The Accident'', detailing the last eight days of a nuclear physicist dying from radiation sickness after a

criticality accident A criticality accident is an accidental uncontrolled nuclear fission chain reaction. It is sometimes referred to as a critical excursion, critical power excursion, or divergent chain reaction. Any such event involves the unintended accumulation ...

, based on the death of physicist

Louis Slotin Louis Alexander Slotin (1 December 1910 – 30 May 1946) was a Canadian physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project. Born and raised in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Slotin earned both his Bachelor of Science and M ...

who died after such an accident in 1946. The novel was so controversial the US banned a movie version of it. A series of radio programs on the bomb earned Masters a

Peabody Award The George Foster Peabody Awards (or simply Peabody Awards or the Peabodys) program, named for the American businessman and philanthropist George Peabody, honor the most powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in television, radio, and ...

in 1963.

On staff of Consumers Union

Shortly after its founding in 1936, Masters joined the staff of Consumers Union, publisher of the magazine Consumer Reports, where he headed a task force publicizing the dangers of cigarette smoking. In the late 1950s, he was instrumental in the organization's analysis of milk samples from around the country for radiation, thus making widely available for the first time information about the fallout dangers of atmospheric nuclear tests. He became director of Consumers Union in 1958, a position he held until 1963. Masters also contributed to the New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, the American Scholar, and other publications.

Personal life

Masters dated

Mildred Edie Brady Mildred Edie Brady (June 3, 1906 – July 27, 1965) was a freelance writer for ''The New Republic'' who is mostly known for writing the May 26, 1947 article ''The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich''For the article, see ; reprinted in (with the subhe ...

and later married her daughter, Joan Brady. Their son

Alexander Masters Alexander Wright Masters is an English author, screenwriter, and worker with the homeless. He lives in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Masters is the son of authors Dexter Masters and Joan Brady. He was educated at Bedales School, and took a first ...

, is also a writer. He moved to

Totnes Totnes ( or ) is a market town and civil parishes in England, civil parish at the head of the estuary of the River Dart in Devon, England, within the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is about west of Paignton, about west-so ...

, Devon, England in 1960, where he died in 1989.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Masters, Dexter 1909 births 1989 deaths Writers from Springfield, Illinois 20th-century American novelists American male novelists 20th-century American male writers Novelists from Illinois