Discusses his childhood and education in Illinois, undergrad and graduate work at Harvard; writing his thesis with Van Vleck; working at Bell Laboratoreis and the scientists there including William Shockley; the rise of interest in solid state physics in the early 1950s; research in superconductivity; the creation of theory groups at Bell Labs in 1956 and the relationship between theorists and experimenters in the lab; decisions on research topics at Bell; his year in Japan with Kubo; security restrictions at Bell and military research; collaborations with John Galt; experiments leading to localization of electrons in 1956-57; development of superconductivity theory; his visit to the Soviet Union in 1958; collaboration with Morel in 1961 on superconductivity; and research philosophy and approach to problems. Others prominently mentioned are: N. Bogolyubov; George Feher, V. Ginzburg, Gorkov, Charles Kittel, Lev Landau, David Pines, Harry Suhl, Gregory Wannier.