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Isaac Asimov
19201992
Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi, Russia. In 1923 his family emigrated to the United States. Asimov grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his family ran a candy and magazine store; it was while working in the store that he acquired the addiction to print and habits of self-discipline that made him one of the most prolific writers of his time.
Captivated by the early science fiction magazines on the racks of the family store, Asimov's earliest writings were in the literary form for which he is known best. In 1939, the same year he graduated from Columbia University, his first published story, "Marooned Off Vesta," appeared in Amazing Stories. Later that year he sold "Trends" to Astounding Science-Fiction, beginning a long and fruitful relationship with that magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. It was Campbell who published the bulk of Asimov's output throughout the 1940s: the Foundation stories (194253), later collected as the Foundation Trilogy (1963), the early robot stories, from which were distilled the now famous "Three Laws of Robotics" that determined what robots could and could not do in much science fiction written afterward; and the celebrated ''Nightfall" (1953). In these stories, Asimov first presented the themes that were to color all his subsequent science fiction: the colossal Galactic Empire whose politics are nonetheless much the same as politics everywhere, the idea of robots as rational, programmable human beings, and an overall affirmation of humanistic, rational inquiry as the only valid route to whatever opportunities for transcendence there may be.
Despite his prolific output throughout the 1940s, Asimov continued to view writing as a sideline and worked toward the Ph.D. in biochemistry he obtained from Columbia in 1948. In 1949 he joined the medical faculty of Boston University, where he remained until 1958, when he finally decided to write full time. By then he had published several science fiction novels in book form, most notably Pebble in the Sky (1950) and The End of Eternity (1955), as well as numerous collections including I, Robot (1950) and The Martian Way and Other Stories (1955). In the late fifties his emphasis shifted

 
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