Single sheet, 177 x 145 mm, with corrections in the hand of the interviewer and a note on the verso: "Interview with Dr. Einstein / March 26 and 27, 1935," toned, a few stray spots, light creases, two small strips of old cellotape on verso. Provenance: Henry A. Rosso, the interviewer; by descent.

ALBERT EINSTEIN SIGNS A PROOF OF THE FIRST INTERVIEW HE GRANTED IN AMERICA, REMARKABLY GIVEN TO A 17-YEAR-OLD HIGH-SCHOOL REPORTER.

In March 1935, Princeton High School journalism student Henry A. “Hank” Rosso achieved a scoop that had eluded the professional press. His teacher had promised an A to any student who could secure an interview with Princeton’s most celebrated resident. After Rosso was initially turned away from Einstein’s home on Mercer Street, a local milkman reportedly revealed the route of Einstein’s customary morning walk. Rosso slipped out of school, positioned himself along the route, and approached the physicist as he passed. The resulting interview, held on March 26 and 27, was the first Einstein granted in the United States following his emigration from Germany in 1933. Rosso arrived without prepared questions, and Einstein himself helped direct the conversation, declining personal topics and suggesting instead that the young reporter ask about mathematics.

Einstein recalled the intellectual revelation of his youth and described his conviction that beneath the apparent complexity of the natural world lay a simple mathematical order: “In my first acquaintance with Mathematics I had the experience to find out by reason the meaning of relation. It was for me wholly different from any other thing in my life. It seemed to me a revelation of the highest author and I will never forget it... Even nature is really in principle a simple structure, it is a mathematical fact. This I have discovered... but it is not the belief of other investigators. It is a kind of faith that helped me through my whole life not to become hopeless in the great difficulties of investigation.”

Walter Isaacson later recounted the unlikely circumstances of the interview in Einstein: His Life and Universe. Rosso had promised Einstein that the interview would appear only in his school newspaper, but, as Isaacson writes, “without his permission it got picked up by the Trenton newspaper and then others around the world, which provided yet another lesson in journalism.” Rosso received his promised A.

The present proof preserves the article before its publication in The Tower on 13 April 1935. Rosso made several manuscript corrections, most notably to the headline, where he struck Einstein’s characterization of the simplicity of nature as “a Mathematical Fact” and replaced it with the more personal “my creed.” Signed by Einstein at the foot, the proof is a remarkable survival from his first American interview and preserves, in Rosso’s corrections, the evolution of the account before its appearance in print. Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, New York, 2007, pp.440-441.