A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. is the biographical account of the Nobel Prize-winning economist upon which the Oscar-winning film directed by Ron Howard was based. The book was written by Sylvia Nasar, a journalism professor at Columbia University and originally published 1998. Nasar’s critically acclaimed study of Nash earned a National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography where it eventually lost to a biography of Charles Lindbergh.
Despite receiving generally favorable reviews and its success in year-end awards, the book was not greeted without controversy. Responding to an unauthorized biography of a controversial subject, several critics were quick to raise issues related to journalistic ethics. Despite these concerns, the biography surprisingly landed on the New York Times bestseller list despite the relative obscurity of its subject within the mainstream at the time. Since the success of the subsequent film adaptation, of course, Nash has become far more integrated into American consciousness as a poster boy of sorts for very high functioning sufferers of extreme mental health disorder.
A comprehensive biographical portrait, the life of John Nash is covered from childhood through his early career success in developing what would eventually become known as “game theory” and his breakthrough career-defining contribution to that paradigm known as the Nash equilibrium. Much of the focus of the story is, of course, on the interruption of that career climb with his now-famous battle with schizophrenia. The book reaches its climax with Nash’s eventual acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994.
While most of the highlights of the narrative are covered in the film, some aspects of Nash’s controversial life and career did not manage to make it from the page to the screen. Most notably, almost certainly, is an arrest for indecent exposure on charges which were eventually dropped and the intimation that Nash’s marriage made famous in the film may not have been rocky due solely to his deteriorating mental condition with intimations of possible latent homosexual tendencies. Nash later publicly refuted all allegations of homosexuality and the filmmakers probably wisely decided to exclude these rather salacious aspects of the Nash biography from their screenplay.
