Radium Girls - Significance - Literature and Film

Literature and Film

• The story is told in Eleanor Swanson's poem Radium Girls, collected in A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium (2003, ISBN 0-9671810-7-0)
• D. W. Gregory told the story of Grace Fryer in the play Radium Girls, which premiered in 2000 at the Playwrights Theatre in Madison, New Jersey.
• There is an elaborate reference to the story in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Jailbird (1979, ISBN 0-385-33390-0)
• Poet Lavinia Greenlaw has written on the subject in The Innocence of Radium (Night Photograph, 1994)
• Historian Claudia Clark wrote an account of the case and its wider historical implications: Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 (published 1997).
• Ross Mullner's book Deadly Glow: The Radium Dial Worker Tragedy describes many of the events (1999, ISBN 0-87553-245-4)
• The story is told by Jo Lawrence in her short animated film "Glow" (2007)
• The story is referenced in the 2007 film Pu-239
• The Michael A. Martone short story It's Time is told from the perspective of an unnamed Radium Girl
• A fictionalized version of the story was featured in the Spike TV show 1000 Ways to Die (#196)
• The story of Catherine Donahue's litigation and the girls at the Ottawa, Illinois, Radium Dial plant was the basis of the play These Shining Lives by Melanie Marnich.
• The Case of the Living Dead Women is a website displaying scans of 180 pages of newspaper clippings of the Ottawa, Illinois radium dial litigation
• Radium Halos: A Novel about the Radium Dial Painters by Shelley Stout is historical fiction narrated by a sixty-five-year-old mental patient who worked at the factory when she was sixteen (ISBN 978-1448696222).
• Author Deborah Blum referenced the story in her 2010 book, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.
• Author Robert R. Johnson features a story on the radium girls in his book Romancing the Atom. (ISBN 978-0313392795)