About the Book

This biography [about the life of pioneering African-American biologist, academic and science writer Ernest Everett Just] illuminates the racial attitudes of an elite group of American scientists and foundation officers. It is the story of a complex and unhappy man. It blends social, institutional, black, and political history with the history of science.

About the Author

Kenneth R. Manning is the Thomas Meloy Professor of Rhetoric at the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and STS. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University (History of Science; 1970, 1971, and 1974). Manning joined the MIT faculty in 1974. His first major work was a study of nineteenth-century mathematics. This was followed by Black Apollo of Science, which won the Pfizer Award and the Lucy Hampton Bostick Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is currently studying the role of blacks in American medicine, and has authored a number of scholarly articles on blacks in science and medicine.

Manning, Kenneth R. Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.