PRINCETON University Press plans eventually to publish a complete scholarly edition of The Writings of Albert Einstein in about twenty volumes. It will take years for this immense project to be carried out, but preliminary work is under way. In the course of this work we learned that Miss Helen Dukas, Einstein’s secretary from 1928 until his death in 1955 and keeper of the Einstein archives since that time, had for her own interest selected various letters and other bits of writing that revealed Einstein’s character and personality. Fascinated by the material already collected, we asked Miss Dukas and Dr. Otto Nathan, the trustees of the Estate of Albert Einstein, for permission to publish it and much similar material in a little book. They graciously gave their consent provided that Professor Banesh Hoffmann of Queens College of the City University of New York would agree to collaborate with Miss Dukas on the project. Dr. Hoffmann had been a collaborator of Einstein’s, and with Miss Dukas had already written an authoritative biography of Einstein, Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel that won the 1973 Science Writing Award of the American Institute of Physics and the United States Steel Foundation. He and Miss Dukas were delighted to renew their former collaboration, and the result is the present book.
At Princeton University Press we take particular pleasure in this book because we were Einstein’s first American publishers, having issued The Meaning of Relativity in 1922, and also his last publishers, since the fifth edition of The Meaning of Relativity contains Einstein’s final formulation of his generalized theory of gravitation. The present book complements the other by giving unique glimpses of a person who was great not only as a scientist but also as a human being.