Marginalian Editions presents a groundbreaking poet’s biography of the forgotten scientist who founded physical chemistry, shaping much of the 20th century—and an ingenious, expansive treatise on American creativity, character, and remembrance.
Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) was an American visionary whose work shaped a century of science by bridging classical mechanics and quantum physics. A kindly and shy bachelor who lectured at Yale in relative obscurity for more than thirty years, he single-handedly created the field of physical chemistry without ever completing a single experiment. Gibbs’s visionary work enabled future scientists to predict what states a substance can assume and under what conditions—the implications for industry, agriculture, and warfare were vast. Hailed by Einstein as “the greatest mind in American history,” Gibbs remained essentially unknown.
To acclaimed poet Muriel Rukeyser, Gibbs “lived closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit in America.” Rukeyser’s thoroughly researched and lyrical tribute to Gibbs is much more than a biography: it is an alchemical compound of philosophy, history, ethics, and literature writ large. It is the story of a country, a century, a global epoch of scientific creativity that would color every realm of human imagination and aspiration, from poetry to politics.
“Muriel Rukeyser[’s] five-hundred-page prose poem about the creative spirit, anchored in the life and legacy of Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) [is] a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world.”
—Maria Popova, From the Foreword
—Albert Einstein
—Waldemar Kaempffert, The New York Times
—TIME
—John Chamberlain, The New York Times
—Philip Blair Rice, The Kenyon Review
Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) was a poet, playwright, biographer, children’s book author, and political activist. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, Theory of Flight (1935), and became central to both American modernism and Leftist political communities over her five-decade career, mentoring scores of younger poets including Alice Walker, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and Adrienne Rich, among many others. Rukeyser was born in New York City and attended Vassar College. After her death in 1980, Rukeyser’s work suffered critical and popular neglect. However, Rukeyser’s body of work has emerged as particularly vital and important to poets and scholars in the first decades of the 21st century.Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning—sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse—a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry—has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.
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