Perhaps the most influential SF writer since HG Wells, Robert Anson Heinlein was born on July 7th, 1907 in Butler, Missouri.
Heinlein admitted that his upbringing in what he himself described as The Bible Belt had a profound effect on his outlook on life, although he was prepared to experiment with his politics and morality, certainly early on his life, when he flirted with Socialism.
Debut Story: Lifeline
Heinlein made his debut with the short story Lifeline in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Editor John W. Campbell quickly recognized Heinlien's innate story-telling ability and bought another two stories and a novelette, Misfit, before Heinlein's first novel, If This Goes On-, was serialized in Astounding only six months after his debut. All four of those first stories appeared in The Past Through Tomorrow, Heinlein's Future History collection in 1967.
Just ten months after his debut, Astounding published "The Roads Must Roll," Heinlein's acclaimed novelette telling of a future America criss-crossed by the Belts, a series of moving roads, and the Guilds who man them. It showcased Heinlein's ability to extrapolate, and to examine social trends, together with crisp dialogue and vivid characterization. A generation later, The Science Fiction Writers of America would vote it amongst the ten best short stories of all time.
A year later, Astounding published 'Universe,' the story of a generation-starship and the slow decay of it's society, which was similarly voted into the second (long-story) volume of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, completing a rare double.
Mid Career:
By the time he was trying desperately to serve his country a year later, Heinlein had established himself as the leading SF writer in the world.
Rejected by the military as unfit, Heinlein nonetheless managed to talk himself into a job at the Naval Experimental Air Station in Philadelphia, where he served the duration of the war. By the time America had returned to peace, Heinlein was targeting much higher-paying markets, such as The Saturday Evening Post for his short stories, and Scribners for a juvenile novel. Rocketship Galileo was the first of a dozen such novels, male-adolescent oriented, the best of which were Space Cadet , Red Planet and Straman Jones, and were perhaps his enduring legacy.
Personal Life:
But even as his professional life flourished, Heinlein's personal life was collapsing; he had married briefly in his early twenties, then again in 1932 to Leslyn MacDonald. That second marriage ended in 1947 when she succumbed to alcoholism. Only when Heinlein married for a third time, to Viginia Gerstenfeld, did he find lasting happiness -- they were married for forty years, and during the last two decades of his life she nursed him through two major illnesses.
Hugo Awards:
In 1956, he won the first of four Hugos, for his novel Double Star. But it is arguable that his best novels, including The Puppet Masters and The Door Into Summer, with its wonderful alternate 2000 as seen from 1956, were published in years when Hugos were not awarded. His most controversial novel, Starship Troopers would end his association with Scibners, Stranger in a Strange Land became an emblem for the counter-culture, but marked the emergence of the didactic Heinlein, for whom talking became more important than storytelling.
After Heinlein's severe bout of peritonitis, Heinlein wrote ever-longer epics, such as Time Enough for Love, and The Number of The Beast, but these had lost his earlier vitality. In 1974, he became the Science Fiction Writers of America's first Grand Master. His last novel, To Sail Beyond The Sunset, was published on his 80th birthday, and he died a year later.
His main legacy is the astonishing burst of early stories, and his domination of the SF scene of the 1950s without really seeming to be in it.
