Richard Rhodes emerged as one of the major nonfiction artists of this age with The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), his sprawling, 886-page, Pulitzer Prize-winning saga that chronicles what he described in a 1994 interview as the "great epic tragedy of the twentieth century: mankind inventing the means of its own destruction." When he followed with two other highly acclaimed works, Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer (1989) and A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood (1990), and then explored human sexuality in the controversial Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey (1992), he entrenched himself as one of the preeminent talents in contemporary American literature, a lyrical voice sounding unmistakable echoes of Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Joseph Conrad.

In the 1991 revised version of The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West (1970) Rhodes states that for him, writing "is done out of pain, and no...