Nuclear Museum Logo
Nuclear Museum Logo

National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Jennet Conant is a bestselling American author and journalist. She is the granddaughter of Manhattan Project administrator James B. Conant and has written extensively on the Manhattan Project and some of its most prominent figures.

Conant was born in Seoul, South Korea. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a B.A. in Political Theory, and double-majored in Philosophy at Haverford College. She received a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Conant worked at Newsweek for seven years and has also written for GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair and the New York Times.

She is the author of five books on World War II: Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II (2002); 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos (2005); The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (2008); A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS (2011); and Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist (2017).

Conant is a member of AHF’s Advisory Committee.

Related Profiles

Leslie R. Groves

Washington, DC

Lieutenant General Leslie Groves (1896-1970) was a United States Army Corps of Engineers officer and director of the Manhattan Project.

Harris Mayer

Los Alamos, NM

Harris Mayer, born in 1921, is an American physicist. During World War II, Mayer joined the Manhattan Project at Columbia University.

David Kaiser

Cambridge, MA

Dr. David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Gioacchino Failla

Chicago, IL

Gioacchino Failla was an Italian-American physicist who served as a consultant at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory (“Met Lab”) during the Manhattan Project.