She came, and the two eventually married. "I'm looking forward to being much happier," he wrote. Years later, after Arline's death, Feynman prevailed upon Gweneth Howarth, a Welsh woman he met in Europe, to live with him as his housekeeper. There are heart-rending letters to his first wife, Arline Greenbaum, who was dying of tuberculosis while Feynman was sequestered in Los Alamos, New Mexico, helping to build the A-bomb. Basic Books), a collection of letters edited by Feynman's daughter, Michelle, is for those who want to rummage around in the recesses of this irrepressible personality. "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track" ( 465 pages. James Gleick's superb biography, "Genius," is still the best work on Feynman's life. The two shared the Nobel Prize for this work in 1965, but by then a new generation of physicists preferred the "Feynman diagrams" because they yielded more intuitive insight than all that math. To describe the dynamics of fundamental particles, his rival, physicist Julian Schwinger, spun a masterful web of mathematics Feynman drew pictures. He liked to derive things from first principles, reinventing theories merely to understand them better. Feynman grew up with a distaste for formality and pretense and with an iconoclasm that went beyond wearing open-collared shirts and playing practical jokes (he liked to pick locks) to the way he approached physics. His father was uneducated but would walk with his son on the beach, pointing out shells and birds, even though he often couldn't identify them. He was born in 1918 into a middle-class Jewish family and grew up in, of all places, Far Rockaway, Queens, an outer borough of New York City. Richard Feynman was a particularly American sort of genius.
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