Background

Robert Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907 to Rex Ivar Heinlein (an accountant) and Bam Lyle Heinlein, in Butler, Missouri. He was a 6th-generation German-American: a family tradition had it that Heinleins fought in every American war starting with the War of Independence. His childhood was spent in Kansas City, Missouri.

Education

He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, with the class of 1929 and went on to serve as an officer in the Navy. He was assigned to the new aircraft carrier USS Lexington in 1931, where he worked in radio communications, then in its earlier phases, with the carrier's aircraft. The captain of this carrier was Ernest J. King, who served as the Chief of Naval Operations and Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet during World War II.

Heinlein also served aboard the destroyer USS Roper in 1933 and 1934, reaching the rank of lieutenant. His brother, Lawrence Heinlein, served in the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, and the Missouri National Guard, and reaching the rank of major general in the National Guard.

In 1934, Heinlein was discharged from the Navy due to pulmonary tuberculosis. During a lengthy hospitalization, he developed a design for a waterbed.

After his discharge, Heinlein attended a few weeks of graduate classes in mathematics and physics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), but he soon quit either because of his health or from a desire to enter politics.

Career

Heinlein supported himself at several occupations, including real estate sales and silver mining, but for some years found money in short supply. Heinlein was active in Upton Sinclair's socialist End Poverty in California movement in the early 1930s. When Sinclair gained the Democratic nomination for Governor of California in 1934, Heinlein worked actively in the campaign. Heinlein himself ran for the California State Assembly in 1938, but was unsuccessful.

After the campaign Heinlein turned to writing to pay off his mortgage. His first published story, "Life-Line", was printed in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Others saw Heinlein's talent and stardom from his first story, and he was quickly acknowledged as a leader of the new movement toward "social" science fiction. In California he hosted the Manana Literary Society, a 1940-1941 series of informal gatherings of new authors. During World War II, he did aeronautical engineering for the U.S. Navy, also recruiting Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to work at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Pennsylvania.

As the war wound down in 1945, Heinlein began to re-evaluate his career. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the outbreak of the Cold War, galvanized him to write nonfiction on political topics. He published four influential short stories for The Saturday Evening Post magazine, leading off, in February 1947, with "The Green Hills of Earth". That made him the first science fiction writer to break out of the "pulp ghetto". In 1950, the movie Destination Moon won an Academy Award for special effects. Also, he embarked on a series of juvenile novels for the Charles Scribner's Sons publishing company that went from 1947 through 1959, at the rate of one book each autumn, in time for Christmas presents to teenagers. He also wrote for Boys' Life in 1952.

Beginning in 1970, Heinlein had a series of health crises, broken by strenuous periods of activity in his hobby of stonemasonry. As soon as he was well enough to write again, he began work on Time Enough for Love (1973), which introduced many of the themes found in his later fiction.

In the mid-1970s, Heinlein wrote two articles for the Britannica Compton Yearbook. While vacationing in Tahiti in early 1978, he suffered a transient ischemic attack. Over the next few months, he became more and more exhausted, and his health again began to decline. The problem was determined to be a blocked carotid artery, and he had one of the earliest known carotid bypass operations to correct it. Heinlein and Virginia had been smokers, and smoking appears often in his fiction, as do fictitious strikable self-lighting cigarettes. Heinlein's surgical treatment re-energized him, and he wrote five novels from 1980 until he died in his sleep from emphysema and heart failure on May 8, 1988.

Achievements

• Heinlein was named the first Science Fiction Writers Grand Master in 1974. Four of his novels won Hugo Awards, while a different four won Nebula Awards. In addition, fifty years after publication, seven of his works were awarded "Retro Hugos" - awards given retrospectively for works that were published before the Hugo Awards came into existence.
  
  In his fiction, Heinlein coined terms that have become part of the English language, including "grok", "waldo", and "speculative fiction", as well as popularizing existing terms like "TANSTAAFL", "pay it forward", and "space marine".
  
  He also anticipated mechanical computer-aided design with "Drafting Dan" and described a modern version of a waterbed in his novel The Door into Summer, though he never patented nor built one. In the first chapter of the novel Space Cadet he anticipated the cell-phone, 35 years before Motorola invented the technology. Several of Heinlein's works have been adapted for film and television.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Starship Troopers
  • Stranger in a Strange Land
  • The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
  • Starman Jones
  • Time Enough for Love
  • Double Star (S.F. MASTERWORKS) eBook: Robert A. Heinlein: Books

Politics

Heinlein's political positions shifted throughout his life. Heinlein's early political leanings were to the liberal.

In 1934, he worked actively for the Democratic campaign of Upton Sinclair for Governor of California. After Sinclair lost, Heinlein became an anti-Communist Democratic activist. He made an unsuccessful bid for a California State Assembly seat in 1938.

Heinlein considered himself a libertarian, in a letter to Judith Merril in 1967 (never sent) he said, "As for libertarian, I've been one all my life, a radical one. You might use the term "philosophical anarchist" or "autarchist" about me, but "libertarian" is easier to define and fits well enough."

Views

During the 1930s and 1940s, Heinlein was deeply interested in Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics and attended a number of seminars on the subject. His views on epistemology seem to have flowed from that interest, and his fictional characters continue to express Korzybskian views to the very end of his writing career. Many of his stories depend strongly on the premise, related to the well-known Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that by using a correctly designed language, one can change or improve oneself mentally, or even realize untapped potential.

However, he was skeptical about Freudianism, especially after a struggle with an editor who insisted on reading Freudian sexual symbolism into his juvenile novels. Heinlein was fascinated by the social credit movement in the 1930s. This is shown in Beyond This Horizon and in his 1938 novel For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs, which was finally published in 2003, long after his death.

Quotations: May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.

Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Membership

• Institute Aeronautical and Astronautics

• Authors Guild American

• Retired Officers Association

• Navy League

• Association United States Army

• Air Force Association

• National Rare Blood (donors) Club

• United States Naval Institute

• California Arts Society

• Minutemen of U.S.S. Lexington

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• In 1974, Jimmy Webb used the author's title The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for his song of the same name:
  
  Robert Heinlein was a kind of early mentor of mine. I started reading his books when I was eight years old. ... I guess I was really getting more of my education out of science-fiction than out of public school. I was reading Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and learning a great deal about the patois of the language itself and how these words were being used to create emotions. I was learning this from writers without even knowing it. ... The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was one of the best titles I've ever heard in my life. I really am guilty of appropriating something from another writer. In this case I had contact with Robert A. Heinlein's attorneys. I said, "I want to write a song with the title, 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress'. Can you ask Mr. Heinlein if it's okay with him?" They called me back and he said he had no objection to it.

Connections

In 1929, Heinlein married Elinor Curry of Kansas City. However, their marriage only lasted about a year. His second marriage in 1932 to Leslyn MacDonald (1904?1981) lasted for 15 years. MacDonald was, according to the testimony of Heinlein's Navy friend, Rear Admiral Cal Laning, "astonishingly intelligent, widely read, and extremely liberal, though a registered Republican."

At the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard he met and befriended a chemical engineer named Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld. After the war, her engagement having fallen through, she moved to UCLA for doctoral studies in chemistry and made contact again. As his second wife's alcoholism gradually spun out of control, Heinlein moved out and the couple filed for divorce. Heinlein's friendship with Virginia turned into a relationship and on October 21, 1948 - shortly after the decree nisi came through - they married in the town of Raton, New Mexico, shortly after setting up housekeeping in Colorado. They remained married until Heinlein's death.

As Heinlein's increasing success as a writer resolved their initial financial woes, they had a house custom built with various innovative features, later described in an article in Popular Mechanics. In 1965, after various chronic health problems of Virginia's were traced back to altitude sickness, they moved to Santa Cruz, California, which is at sea level. They built a new residence in the adjacent village of Bonny Doon, California. Robert and Virginia designed and built their California house themselves, which is in a circular shape. Previously they had also designed and built their Colorado house.

Father:

Rex Ivar Heinlein

Mother:

Bam Lyle Heinlein

Spouse:

Elinor Curry

Spouse:

Leslyn Macdonald

Spouse:

Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld

Ginny undoubtedly served as a model for many of his intelligent, fiercely independent female characters. She was a chemist, rocket test engineer, and held a higher rank in the Navy than Heinlein himself. She was also an accomplished college athlete, earning four letters. Ginny acted as the first reader of his manuscripts.

Brother:

Lawrence Heinlein

Brother:

Rex Heinlein Jr

Brother:

Jesse Heinlein

Sister:

Mary Jean Heinlein Lermer

Sister:

Rose Betty Heinlein

Sister:

Louise Heinlein Bacchus