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Page 10
Asimov went as an author and felt guilty about it ever after. But as he became more and more an author, he became less and less a fan.
By the time of the World Convention Asimov was a bona fide author in his own eyes because Astounding had published his tenth story, "Trends," in its issue of July 1939. Almost two years later it published the second of his robot stories (the first, "Robbie," was published in the September 1940 Super Science Stories as "Strange Playfellow''), and within the next fourteen months, two more robot stories, plus "Nightfall," and "Foundation" and its sequel. Though Asimov didn't know it at the time, "Nightfall" alone made him, in his own words, "a major figure in the field." The stories did not earn that much money, but what they brought in was put to good use, paying for his tuition or accumulating in a bank account. He had three stories published in 1939, seven in 1940, eight in 1941, ten in 1941, only one in 1943, three in 1944, four in 1945, one in 1946, one in 1947, two in 1948, three in 1949, and six in 1950.
It was not a remarkable record of productivity or success; it brought Asimov a total of $7,821.75, which amounted to little more than $710 a year. It was not enough to encourage him to consider a career as a full-time writer, but it did provide a growing feeling of economic security. Finally, Doubleday published his first novel, Pebble in the Sky, in 1950. A specialty house called Gnome Press began publishing his robot stories and then his Foundation stories as books. His income from writing slowly began to equal and then to exceed his income from teaching at Boston University School of Medicine, and, after a disagreement with his superior, he turned to the career that had seemed impossible for all those years.
The impression even the casual reader may obtain from Asimov's autobiography is that he was shaped by his childhood. He referred continually to the way in which the candy store controlled his early life and the way the habits of those years had carried over into his later life. His industry he still wrote seven days a week and ten hours a day until the poor health of the last two or three years of his life, turning out six to ten thousand words on an average day he traced to the long hours at the candy store, for instance, and to his father's accusations that he was lazy when found in a corner reading.
In a similar way, Asimov traced his ability to eat anything to his mother's hearty, indigestible cuisine, and his habit of eating swiftly to the fact that he and his mother and sister had to eat in a hurry so that his father could be relieved of his duties in the candy store and eat his supper in a more leisurely fashion. He read while he ate because he

 
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