Jean Tatlock | |
|---|---|
 Tatlock c. 1940 | |
| Born | Jean Frances Tatlock February 21, 1914 Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. |
| Died | January 4, 1944 (aged 29) |
| Cause of death | Suicide (disputed) |
| Education | Vassar College (BA) University of California, Berkeley Stanford University (MD) |
| Occupation | Psychiatrist |
| Political party | Communist Party USA |
| Parents |
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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. Tatlock began seeing Oppenheimer in 1936, when she was a graduate student at Stanford and Oppenheimer was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. As a result of their relationship 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.