James Gleick

• 1. Introduction

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  James Gleick was born on the 1st of August 1954 in New York City, and he would go on to become what the Wall Street Journal called a master of three skills that most writers can only claim one of: crafting historical narrative, elucidating esoteric theories, and humanizing scientists. The Wall Street Journal put it plainly: few writers manage all three at once. Gleick does.

  He has been called "one of the great science writers of all time." His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Three of them were finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. And somewhere along the way, he helped coin a phrase now used in everyday conversation, built one of the earliest graphical internet services in New York City, and became part of the inspiration for a character in one of the most famous science fiction films ever made.

  What drove a Harvard-trained linguist from a short-lived alternative newspaper in Minneapolis to the frontier of chaos science, and then to the internet, and then to the history of information itself? The answer begins, as many things do, at a desk at The New York Times.

• 2. From Newspaper to Chaos

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  Gleick graduated from Harvard College in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics, having served as an editor of The Harvard Crimson. He did not head straight into the world of books. He moved to Minneapolis first, where he helped found an alternative weekly newspaper called Metropolis. It folded after a year.

  Back in New York in 1979, he joined the staff of The New York Times, where he spent a decade working first on the metropolitan desk and then as a science reporter. His subjects in the New York Times Magazine included Douglas Hofstadter, Stephen Jay Gould, Mitchell Feigenbaum, and Benoit Mandelbrot. Those last two names point toward where his writing would go next.

  His early reporting on Microsoft also proved prescient. It anticipated the antitrust investigations that would later be launched by the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission.

  All of that journalism fed his first book. Chaos: Making a New Science appeared in 1987 and reported the development of what scientists were calling chaos and complexity theory. The book made the butterfly effect a household term and introduced the Mandelbrot set and fractal geometry to a broad general audience. Tom Stoppard drew on it for his play Arcadia. Michael Crichton drew on it for Jurassic Park, and the character Ian Malcolm in that novel was partly inspired by Gleick himself.

• 3. Building the Pipeline

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  In 1993, Gleick's frustration with a specific piece of software led him to build something. His experience configuring procmail at Panix, an early internet provider, was poor enough that he decided to create his own solution.

  He founded The Pipeline, one of the earliest internet service providers in New York City. What made it stand out was its interface. The Pipeline was the first ISP to offer a graphical user interface, bundling e-mail, chat, Usenet, and the World Wide Web into a single software package that ran on both Windows and Mac.

  Gleick and his business partner Uday Ivatury licensed the Pipeline software to other ISPs across the United States and internationally. Two years after founding it, in 1995, Gleick sold The Pipeline to PSINet. The service was later absorbed into MindSpring and then into EarthLink.

• 4. Biographies and Beyond

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  After Chaos, Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos, and worked with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. Then he turned to biography.

  His life of the physicist Richard Feynman, titled Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, was followed by a biography of Isaac Newton. The novelist John Banville reviewed the Newton book and wrote that it would "surely stand as the definitive study for a very long time to come."

  From 1995 to 1999, Gleick wrote the "Fast Forward" column in the New York Times Magazine. Those essays tracking the rise of the internet became the foundation for his book What Just Happened. His work also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Washington Post, and he became a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.

  In 1989-90 he held the McGraw Distinguished Lectureship at Princeton University. In 2000 he became the first editor of The Best American Science Writing series, a role that positioned him as a curator of the field he had long inhabited as a practitioner.

• 5. The Information

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  The book that brought Gleick his most formal recognition arrived in 2011. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood traced the deep history of human communication and data. Like Chaos before it, it became an international bestseller.

  In 2012, The Information received two major prizes: the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. It was also a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, as were two of Gleick's earlier books.

  His writing style, one description holds, combines a "clear mind, magpie-styled research and explanatory verve." In 2017 he was elected president of the Authors Guild, a professional role that extended his influence beyond the page into the institutional life of American letters.

• 6. December 1997

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  On the 20th of December 1997, Gleick was attempting to land a Rutan Long-EZ experimental plane at Greenwood Lake Airport in West Milford, New Jersey. Ice built up in the engine's carburetor, cutting power to the aircraft. The plane came down short of the runway, into rising terrain.

  The crash killed Gleick's eight-year-old son, Harry. Gleick himself was seriously injured.

  That moment sits in the public record of his life alongside the bestsellers and the prizes, a private catastrophe embedded in a career devoted to understanding how the world actually works.