Jean Tatlock

Jean Frances Tatlock (February 21, 1914 – January 4, 1944) was an American psychiatrist. She was a member of the Communist Party USA and was a reporter and writer for the party's publication Western Worker. She is also known for her romantic relationship with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.

The daughter of John Strong Perry Tatlock, a prominent Old English philologist and an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer, Tatlock was a graduate of Vassar College and the Stanford Medical School, where she studied to become a psychiatrist. As a result of her relationship with Oppenheimer and her membership of the Communist Party, she was placed under surveillance by the FBI and her phone was tapped. Tatlock experienced clinical depression, and died by suicide on January 4, 1944.

Early life

Jean Frances Tatlock was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on February 21, 1914, the second child of John Strong Perry Tatlock and Marjorie née Fenton. She had an older brother, Hugh, who became a physician. Her father, who had a PhD from Harvard University, was a noted and acclaimed professor of English at the University of Michigan; an Old English philologist; an expert on Geoffrey Chaucer and English plays, poems, and Elizabethan literature; and author of approximately 60 books on those subjects, including The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1912) and The Mind and Art of Chaucer (1950). He was a professor of English at Stanford from 1915 to 1925, and Harvard from 1925 to 1929, before returning to the Bay Area as a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jean Tatlock attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Williams College in Berkeley.