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Robert A. Heinlein
19071988
Robert Anson Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907, in Butler, Missouri, and spent his childhood in Kansas City. In 1929 he graduated from the United States Naval Academy, and for the next five years he served as an officer on several ships including the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Lexington. In 1934 ill health forced him to retire from the Navy. He then sold real estate, involved himself in politics and silver-mining speculation, and studied physics at U.C.L.A.; in 1939 he wrote and sold his first story, "Life-Line," to John W. Campbell's Astounding.
Over the next three years Heinlein, with Campbell's guidance and support, moved from complete obscurity to a position of unrivaled dominance in SF, producing in that time four novels plus so many short stories that several were published pseudonymously in order to avoid having more than one story under Heinlein's name appear in any single magazine issue. All this fiction from Heinlein's first period, as well as most of his later work, has been reprinted in book form; much of it forms the nucleus to his "Future History" sequence, collected in the 1966 omnibus volume The Past through Tomorrow. Other work in these years ranged from SF-adventure potboilers such as Sixth Column (serialized 1941; book publication 1949) to sophisticated fantasies ("They," 1941; "The Devil Makes the Law," 1942). The core of Heinlein's SF, however, was and has remained matter-of-fact, provocative "hard SF'' like Beyond This Horizon (serialized 1942; book publication 1948).
From 1942 to 1945 Heinlein worked as an aviation engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia. In 1947 he returned to SF, publishing a string of short stories in the Saturday Evening Post in addition to more novels and short works in the SF magazines. Throughout the 1950s he also wrote several SF novels for teenagers; later reissued without the juvenile-market packaging, some of them (notably The Star Beast, 1954; Time for the Stars, 1956; and Citizen of the Galaxy, 1957) have retained the interest of critics and adult readers as well. In 1956 he published one of his best-regarded novels, Double Star.

 
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