2015-03-30

Elizebeth Friedman biography, "Divine Fire"

In previous posts on this blog (for example, Elizebeth Friedman and the Lew Kim Yuen case, Elizebeth Friedman and the Gordon Lim case, Elizebeth Friedman and the Holmwood case, and so on), I'm mentioned some of the events in Elizebeth Friedman's life. A timeline of ESF's life, based on her own partial memoir, is here (pdf),

While I did a lot of work on it, the mountain of effort is due to Katie Letcher Lyle, who created the almost finished manuscript years ago, through personal interviews she had with with Elizebeth Friedman herself. I'm grateful to Katie for inviting me to help polish up some technical details and hope you, the reader, enjoy the result, Divine Fire.

Sadly, Katie died suddenly in August 2016. There is a short obit included in the books' preface.

Recently, PBS has broadcast an hour long documentary based on Fagone's 2017 biography of ESF, The Woman Who Smashed Codes. You can find that documentary streaming on you computer here: The Codebreaker (aired 2020-01-11). The website says the streaming "Expires: 02/08/21". Jason Fagone gave a talk in 2018 on his book and it's been posted to youtube.
The pdf of Divine Fire is here.