Robert A. Heinlein

He wanted the Navy, and the Navy is what he lost. Heinlein was born in Butler, Missouri, in 1907 and raised in Kansas City by a family too poor to pay for college, so he petitioned a Missouri senator until Annapolis admitted him. He graduated in 1929 and served five years at sea, working radio on the carrier Lexington and guns on the destroyer Roper. Pulmonary tuberculosis ended that in 1934. The Navy retired him at 27 on a small disability pension. He tried real estate, silver mining and a run for the California State Assembly in 1938, losing the primary by fewer than 500 votes. Then, with a mortgage to pay, he wrote a story for a magazine contest and sold it to Astounding instead, because Astounding paid more.

The career came in three parts. First the Astounding stories under John W. Campbell, plotted onto a charted Future History. Then the juveniles for Scribner's, one each autumn through the 1950s, which taught a generation of American engineers and astronauts what space might be. Then the late novels — Starship Troopers in 1959, Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966. Four Hugos, more than anyone had won. His real technical change was method: he let a future world show through incidental detail rather than explaining it, and that is now standard.

Two of his books are read as arguments against each other. Starship Troopers imagines a society where the vote is earned by a term of federal service, and readers have called it militarist since it appeared in 1959 — Scribner's rejected it as too controversial for its line. Stranger in a Strange Land, published two years later, became a countercultural text about free love and communal living, taken up by people who despised Troopers. His own politics moved as far. He organized for Upton Sinclair's socialist End Poverty in California campaign in 1934 and ran as a left-wing Democrat in 1938, and by 1958 he was founding the Patrick Henry League to defend nuclear testing. He called himself a lifelong radical libertarian, and he rejected the charge that he was prescribing rather than exploring.

Peritonitis nearly killed him in 1970, and it took repeated transfusions to pull him through. He and Virginia spent years afterward crisscrossing the country to reorganize blood donation, and at conventions he asked fans wanting an autograph to co-sign a pledge to give blood. He died in his sleep of emphysema and heart failure on May 8, 1988, at 80, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Virginia edited his letters into Grumbles from the Grave the next year. The argument over the five late novels has not settled — admirers read them as a writer finally unconstrained, detractors as long stretches of the author talking, and David Langford wrote about them scathingly.

Robert A. Heinlein's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Double Star book
  His first Hugo Award for Best Novel 1956
• Have Space Suit—Will Travel book
  The last of the juveniles Scribner's published 1958
• Starship Troopers book
  Rejected by Scribner's, published by Putnam, argued about ever since 1959
• Stranger in a Strange Land book
  Gave English the verb grok and the 1960s a scripture 1961
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress book
  A lunar war of independence, and the slogan TANSTAAFL 1966
• Time Enough for Love book
  Written as he came back from the illness that nearly killed him 1973

• 1929 aged ~22 Graduates from the Naval Academy and is commissioned an ensign Fifth in his class academically, 20th of 243 once demerits were counted.
• 1934 aged ~27 Discharged from the Navy with pulmonary tuberculosis A long hospitalization, a small disability pension, and no career.
• 1938 aged ~31 Loses a California State Assembly primary by fewer than 500 votes A left-wing Democrat running in a conservative district, out of more than 10,000 ballots cast.
• August 1939 aged 32 Life-Line appears in Astounding Science Fiction Written for a contest and sold to Campbell instead, for more than the first prize paid.
• February 1947 aged 39 The Green Hills of Earth runs in The Saturday Evening Post The first science fiction writer to get out of the pulp magazines.
• 1959 aged ~52 Scribner's rejects Starship Troopers and the juveniles end Putnam took it, and the run of one juvenile novel a year was over.
• July 20, 1969 aged 62 Commentates the Apollo 11 landing for Walter Cronkite Alongside Arthur C. Clarke. He called it New Year's Day of the Year One.
• 1974 aged ~67 Named the first SFWA Grand Master
• May 8, 1988 aged 80 Dies in his sleep in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California Emphysema and heart failure, at 80.

• Upton Sinclair 1878–1968
  Novelist whose expose of Chicago meatpacking spurred federal food and drug inspection laws. campaigned for
• Barry Goldwater 1909–1998
  Senator and presidential nominee whose 1964 campaign helped create the modern conservative movement. campaigned for
• Ray Bradbury 1920–2012
  Science fiction writer whose Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles became American classics. mentor
• Isaac Asimov 1920–1992
  Writer whose science fiction and popular science helped shape public imagination about robots, technology, and the future. recruited
• Philip K. Dick 1928–1982
  Wrote 45 novels asking whether reality is real and who counts as human, and Hollywood has filmed them ever since. influenced
• Ursula K. Le Guin 1929–2018
  Writer who used speculative fiction to examine gender, power, culture, and alternative social arrangements. influenced