E. J. Applewhite

American author and former CIA officer (1919–2005) who became Buckminster Fuller's essential collaborator on Synergetics, and who chronicled that collaboration in Cosmic Fishing (1977).

Applewhite brought editorial discipline and persistence to Fuller's sprawling geometric vision. Over years of telephone calls, faxes, and marginalia he helped shape the two volumes of Synergetics into a publishable text — famously discovering that Fuller's black briefcase held not proofs but "fifty pages of blank verse." His memoir Cosmic Fishing is the candid inside story of what it took to co-write with Fuller, and he later compiled the Synergetics Dictionary concordance of Fuller's vocabulary.

Role in Fuller's orbit

Applewhite is Fuller's closest literary collaborator — the co-author who made Synergetics a finished book rather than an unfinishable manuscript, and the movement's most reliable witness to how Fuller actually worked.

See Also

• Cosmic Fishing (Cosmic Fishing) — Applewhite's account of co-writing Synergetics
• Synergetics (Synergetics) — the two-volume work he co-authored with Fuller
• Amy C. Edmondson (Amy C. Edmondson) — fellow explicator of synergetics

Sources

• Cosmic Fishing (source reference) — Applewhite's memoir of the collaboration
• Synergetics (source reference) — the work he co-authored