Robert Anson Heinlein was born on 7 July 1907, in Butler, Bates County, Missouri, the third son of Rex Ivar Heinlein and Bam Lyle Heinlein. He attended public school in Kansas City and graduated from Central High School in 1924. In 1929 he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and served in aircraft carriers and destroyers. During this period he married Leslyn McDonald. In 1934 he was invalided out for tuberculosis. Heinlein started to study physics at the graduate school of U.C.L.A. He left the school without completing his studies and worked in odd jobs in mining and real estate without real success. At the age of 32 he turned his hand to the writing science fiction. Heinlein's first published stories appeared in action-adventure pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction in 1939. It was edited by John W. Campbell, who has been credited with moving SF toward its modern form. Under his influence writers started to examine how technology might affect the everyday life of ordinary people and society in general.
Heinlein never got over his navy discharge. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he tried to enlist but was rejected. During World War II years from 1943 Heinlein published no stories, but worked as an engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station, Philadelphia. His first novel, Rocket ship Galileo, appeared in 1947, and paved way to childrens' science fiction. After divorce he married in 1948 Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld. From 1947 to 1959 Heinlein produced sixteen novels.
Heinlein's early works emphasized adventure and were aimed at young readers. In 1959 he received the Boys' Clubs of America Book Award. In these novels Heinlein avoided open didacticism, although his young protagonists learned lessons in courage, tolerance, and military virtues during the course of the story. Often Heinlein's male protagonist has to go through rites of passage - he meets a guru or somebody who has superior wisdom, and after a period of learning he has to earn his place in a group and prove his skills. Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), dedicated to Fritz Leiber, was actually Oliver Twist in space.
In Starship Troopers (1959) Heinlein showed his fascination with the glamour of weaponry. The book earned him again the prestigious Hugo Award. Starship Troopers first appeared in abridged form in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959.From the late 1950s Heinlein started write expressly for adults and deal with such topics as cloning, incest, religion, free love and mysticism. His short stories were independent of one another but related in the author's 'Future History: 1951-2600' AD time line. Some of his characters periodically appear in different novels, among the Lazarus Long from Methuselah'S children (1958). Nearly all of Heinlein's work fit into a specific time period within this larger scheme. The idea was later imitated by several writers, with considerable success by Poul Anderson and Larry Niven. Also Isaac Asimov developed similar scheme, and claimed imaginative copyright on the imagined future.
Among Heinlein's best known works is the hippie oriented Stranger in a strange land (1961). It became the most successful science-fiction novel ever published. Glory Road (1963) has been decades one of Heinlein's most popular books, written in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars stories. Moon is a harsh mistress (1966) was set in an exploited penal colony, Luna. In I will fear no evil (1971) a dying tycoon, Johann Smith, has his brain transplanted into the body of Eunice, a young black woman. Cat who walks through walls (1985) was about alternate histories and time travels.
Usually Heinlein spent some three months with his writing and travelled widely for the rest of the time. In 1973 he taught as James V. Forrestal Lecturer at the U.S. Naval Academy. He was awarded the first Grand Master Nebula in 1975. Heinlein was repeatedly voted as 'the best all-time author' in reader's polls held by the magazine Locus in 1973 and 1975. On May 8, 1988, he died peacefully in his morning nap. His body was cremated, his ashes strewn in the Pacific from the deck of a warship.
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