Max Perutz was an avid letter writer, so much so that his correspondence provides the autobiography he never wrote. Edited by his daughter Vivien, What a Time I Am Having: Selected Letters of Max Perutz chronicles Perutz's adventurous life through his own vivid, erudite, and humorous pen. These letters document the hopes, roadblocks, and moments of elation in his sixty-year quest to understand the molecular biology of hemoglobin. The first great step in this quest — unraveling the molecular structure of hemoglobin — earned Perutz the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Narrated against a backdrop of family and friends, politics and war, literature, travels, and Max's beloved mountains, these letters provide rare insight into the thoughts of a unique scientist. Starting with charming letters to a girlfriend written in his youth in Vienna and the impressions of a young scientist in Cambridge, the letters progress to the desperate pleas of an "enemy alien" interned in Canada during World War II. The diary of Max's subsequent super-secret war work for the British to build a floating ice airstrip in the North Atlantic, ardent campaigning letters to scientists and politicians, and self-deprecating stories of his own mishaps written to amuse his children and grandchildren are some of the many highlights of these fascinating letters. This book is a companion to Georgina Ferry's Max Perutz and the Secret of Life. Together these volumes provide a vivid portrait of an extraordinary character in the development of molecular biology.