Madame Curie | Literary Criticism & Book Review

Madame Curie Critical Overview

Madame Curie was first published in 1937 and became one of the best-selling biographies ever. Eve Curie received a 1937 National Book Award for Madame Curie by the American Booksellers Association. It was also a selection in the Book-of-the-Month Club. That this was an authoritative biography is evidenced by the fact that no other biography of Marie Curie was published until over thirty years later. Marie Curie (1974), by Robert Reid, added the historical hindsight of the implications of research on radioactivity during the World War II and Cold War eras to the story already told by Eve Curie.

Marie Curie: A Life (1995), by Susan Quinn, is based on new information from Marie Curie's journals, which were released to researchers for the first time in 1990. In particular, Quinn reveals the unspecified scandal to which Eve Curie refers in only the vaguest of terms. Some time after the...
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