Haakon Chevalier

Haakon Maurice Chevalier (Lakewood Township, New Jersey, September 10, 1901 – July 4, 1985) was an American author, translator, and professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley best known for his friendship with physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom he met at Berkeley, California in 1937.

Oppenheimer's relationship with Chevalier, and Chevalier's relationship with a possible recruiter for Soviet intelligence, figured prominently in a 1954 hearing of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission on Oppenheimer's security clearance. At that hearing, Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked.

Chevalier was born September 10, 1901 in Lakewood Township, New Jersey to French and Norwegian parents. As he was in his twenties he felt attracted by the romantic aspects of seafaring and embarked as a deckhand on one of the last commercial sailing ships, the four masted US schooner Rosamond for a voyage to the southern ocean and Cape Town. He left a vivid and nostalgic testimony of this very end of the age of sail in his book The Last Voyage of the Schooner Rosamond.

In 1945, he served as a translator for the Nuremberg Trials.

He translated many works by Salvador Dalí, André Malraux, Vladimir Pozner, Louis Aragon, Frantz Fanon and Victor Vasarely into English.

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