The section about 45m in ("The Myth of Richard Feynman) covers it in a hair under seven minutes.
She notices that in the preface to "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", the author says that people have the "mistaken idea" that "Surely You're Joking..." was an autobiography. The preface, which was written from the perspective of the author of the books, is attributed to Ralph Leighton, who has a Wikipedia article about him. It turns out that he wrote the books, years later, based on stories Feynman told him at drumming circles. So it's not exactly a secret, but also not exactly publicized - Leighton's name is nowhere on the book jackets, for instance.
The video goes onto explain that this is the case for anything commonly attributed to him - The Feynman Lectures, for instance, were transcribed/edited/turned into books by Robert B. Leighton (Ralph's father) and Matthew Sands.
She then cites the general "never wrote a book" claim as directly coming from James Gleick's "Genius", which is a well-regarded and fact-checked biography of Feynman.
I see. In a strict sense, yes, published books like Surely You're Joking and its sequel, The Feynman Lectures, QED, etc. weren't "written" by Feynman himself.
But the statement "never wrote a book", without a lot of context (which might be in the video or Gleick's biography, but wasn't in the post I responded to), suggests that Feynman didn't create the content that's in the books, but someone else did and Feynman took credit for them. That is emphatically not the case. All of the content of those books is Feynman's. Leighton took Feynman's content, delivered orally, and put it into publishable book form. Certainly not a negligible task, and he deserves credit for it, but it doesn't mean the books aren't Feynman's content. They are. And nobody, certainly not Leighton, ever said otherwise.
I don't think the problem people have is "Richard Feynman didn't produce content"
It's "the content that people interacted with that they formed an opinion on "Richard Feynman" from was actually editorialized and published by other people"
They're not trying to take credit from Feynman, theyre trying to divorce the character of "Feynman" as written by these authors from the real historical person
To the extent that the character of "Feynman" as he appears in books like Surely You're Joking is different from the real historical person, I think the difference is due to Feynman himself--the way he told the stories orally to people like Leighton. I don't think it's due in any significant measure to people like Leighton "editoralizing" when they wrote up the stories for publication.
So again, I think "never wrote a book" is misleading if it gives the impression that the portrayal of Feynman in such books was not Feynman's own portrayal of himself. It was.
That's true, i guess I'm trying to say "the portrayal of Feynman versus the reality of him" which "he didn't write any books" doesn't represent well.
With some more thought, the fact that he wasn't the direct author of any books is interesting but not really that significant to his character, so i can't see much reason to point it out other than to discredit his achievements.
Though if the achievement being discredited is the number of books he's seemingly written then it makes sense to a degree.
> if the achievement being discredited is the number of books he's seemingly written then it makes sense to a degree.
Only if you take "written" literally, as in, he didn't do the actual writing, he just told the stories orally and someone else wrote them down.
I personally don't care much about that; the stories are his (including, as I've said, whatever misrepresentations of what actually happened they contain). Lots of people have books ghostwritten, and that's not considered unusual.
More than that, there are famous examples of books for which someone got the credit for the writing when they actually did little or none of it: John F. Kennedy being credited as the author of Profiles in Courage, for example. Even the content of Profiles in Courage was probably less Kennedy's than the content of the books Feynman gets credited for was Feynman's.
The section about 45m in ("The Myth of Richard Feynman) covers it in a hair under seven minutes.
She notices that in the preface to "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", the author says that people have the "mistaken idea" that "Surely You're Joking..." was an autobiography. The preface, which was written from the perspective of the author of the books, is attributed to Ralph Leighton, who has a Wikipedia article about him. It turns out that he wrote the books, years later, based on stories Feynman told him at drumming circles. So it's not exactly a secret, but also not exactly publicized - Leighton's name is nowhere on the book jackets, for instance.
The video goes onto explain that this is the case for anything commonly attributed to him - The Feynman Lectures, for instance, were transcribed/edited/turned into books by Robert B. Leighton (Ralph's father) and Matthew Sands.
She then cites the general "never wrote a book" claim as directly coming from James Gleick's "Genius", which is a well-regarded and fact-checked biography of Feynman.