# Compound S *A Biography of Percy Julian* — Legendary Biographies No. 070 - **Subject:** Percy Lavon Julian - **Written by:** Ailsa Rennie - **Shelf:** Science / Science - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 201 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 201 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-078-2) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby (ISBN 979-8-90623-158-1) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/070-compound-s.html ## About this book He was born on April 11, 1899, in Montgomery, Alabama, six years after the Plessy v. Ferguson plaintiff Homer Plessy had been arrested in New Orleans, and the grandson of two formerly enslaved Alabama field hands. He graduated valedictorian of DePauw University's class of 1920 — a young Black man in a class otherwise entirely white — and the chemistry department recommended he abandon graduate study. He earned his Vienna Ph.D. anyway in 1931, returned to a country that would not give him a research-faculty appointment, and went to work for a Chicago paint company. Ailsa Rennie's biography traces the arc through the Glidden Company soybean-protein laboratory where Percy Lavon Julian synthesised the physostigmine, cortisone, and progesterone precursors that built half of twentieth-century pharmacology, through the 1950 firebombing of his Oak Park house, through the founding of Julian Laboratories in 1953 and its 1961 sale for $2.3 million, and through the National Academy of Sciences election in 1973 — the second African-American member. What emerges is a portrait of an organic chemist whose work the country kept downstream of his life and whose patents are still cited in the literature of two pharmaceutical industries. ## Contents 1. Montgomery 2. The Attic 3. Harvard Yard 4. Vienna 5. Physostigmine 6. The Paint Company 7. Anna 8. Soy 9. Oak Park 10. Compound S 11. Julian Laboratories 12. The Pill 13. The Civil Rights Chemist 14. One Hundred Patents 15. The Family 16. Recognition 17. Last Reactions 18. The Synthesis ## Questions **Who is Compound S about?** Percy Lavon Julian. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case Compound S — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,139 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 201 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Ailsa Rennie writes biography out of Edinburgh, with a focus on women in twentieth-century science, art, and letters whose work was historically credited to the men in the rooms beside them. Her writing uncovers forgotten archival papers to reconstruct the lived realities of intellectual collaboration. Through works like Compound S, The Fossil Hunter, and The Birkbeck Years, she examines the institutional structures that obscured female achievement. She also explores these themes of lost legacy and ownership in The Paris Radium Institute and The Letter from Madras. She lives in the Edinburgh suburbs, where she spends her weekends restoring antique bookbindings and volunteering at a local community orchard.