J. Robert Oppenheimer was born to a wealthy Jewish couple in New York in 1904. His father Julius Oppenheimer was a textile importer and his mother Ella Friedman was a painter. In his early years, he was interested in mineral collection and began to start sending letters to the New York Mineralogy Club. At age 12, the club asked him to present a paper unaware of his youth. He was successful in school, and his early education was done at the Ethical Culture School in New York until he graduated in 1921.
After his high school education, a case of dysentery postponed his entrance into Harvard until 1922. He studied mostly math and science, showing a preference for chemistry saying that it was “at the heart of things.” He also showed a great affinity for learning languages and throughout his life he would pick up a language quickly in order to read a text in its original form. Finally, he also showed interest in Eastern philosophy and classical literature. He graduated from Harvard in 1925. He obtained his PhD afterward in Germany from the prestigious University of Göttingen.
Oppenheimer was always a brooding and intense man. As a youth he suffered some degree of torment from kids his age for his bookish tendencies. During his college years, he sustained several bouts of depression. Looking back at his college years, Oppenheimer remarked that virtually everything aroused “a very great sense of revulsion and wrong.” He had a tendency to ask difficult questions of his professors. After his oral PhD exam, one of his evaluators was reputed to have said that “Phew, I’m glad that’s over. He was on the point of questioning me.”
In 1929 Oppenheimer returned to the United States to take up teaching positions at Berkeley and Cal Tech. During the 30’s, Oppenheimer began to become associated with a variety of heavily left-wing organizations affiliated with Communism. This was mainly due to the repression of several Jewish relatives in Nazi Germany. He married Katherine Harrison in 1940, who was a member of the Communist party and had two children. He also started to distance himself from his former leftist friends and groups. This was probably largely done to make himself more attractive to obtaining the post of head of development for atomic bombs.