Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1, 1907-1948: Learning Curve, by William H. Patterson Jr., $29.99
More than 20 years after his death, Robert Heinlein is still a large presence in science fiction. His works are read and debated. The debates about his work often turn into debates about his life and beliefs. It’s popular to put labels on his political and cultural positions, but labels don’t do justice to his interesting and sometimes complex life.
William H. Patterson Jr.’s book is labeled “the authorized biography.” Much of the material comes from the assistance of Heinlein’s widow, Virginia, who died in 2003. This first volume covers Heinlein’s life from his birth in Kansas in 1907 to his marriage to Virginia in Colorado Springs in 1948.
Actually they drove to New Mexico to be married so the neighbors wouldn’t know they had been living in sin for their first month in town.
Heinlein became self-supporting at a young age with a series of jobs starting when he was 9. He wanted to follow in his brother’s footsteps at Annapolis and tirelessly pursed recommendations from the Kansas City political machine until he got an appointment to the Naval Academy. He was able to serve in the Navy for only four years until forced to take a medical discharge.
He also had a countercultural side. In 1930, when he had a few months of naval training in New York, he rented an apartment in Greenwich Village. Here he worked as a sculptor specializing in images of nude women and socialized in the Bohemian art world.
In 1933, he came to Colorado to be treated for tuberculosis at Fitzsimons Army Hospital. It was a rough time, and he didn’t really get better until he started treatment with a private physician. One self-prescribed treatment was nudist recreation. He became an early member of the Colorado Sunshine Club, the early incarnation of Mountain Air Ranch.
He was pronounced well enough to return to California about six months before the Sunshine Club was raided by the police and became a front page scandal in The Denver Post.
In California in 1936, he worked on Upton Sinclair’s progressive campaign for governor. He remained deeply involved in Democratic Party organizing after the election and in 1938 started a long-shot campaign for the California State Assembly in a heavily Republican district. He lost the primary election to the incumbent.
Searching for a career after politics, Heinlein found the calling that would make him famous. He sold his first short story to John Campbell in 1939 and quickly became the leading light in a movement that brought a new adult sensibility to science fiction.
By the summer of 1941 he was back in Denver as guest of honor at the third World Science Fiction Convention. Four months later, he had given up writing and was looking for a way to help in the war effort. The place he found was a research lab in Philadelphia where he recruited fellow writers, including a young and rambunctious Isaac Asimov.
In 1932, Heinlein’s best friend introduced his new girlfriend, Leslyn McDonald, a poet and an actress. Heinlein slept with her that night and proposed marriage in the morning. This was actually his second impetuous marriage; little is known about his first wife, who was left in Kansas City while Heinlein was in the Navy. Leslyn energetically supported his careers in politics and science fiction. In Philadelphia, she found a war-related job and worked herself to exhaustion.
When the couple returned to California after the war, the marriage was breaking up. Leslyn was drinking heavily and Robert was trying to break into fields beyond the pulp magazines he published in before the war. The book ends with a new beginning as Heinlein settles down for what will be a long stay in Colorado Springs with a new wife.
This is a long and detailed biography with extensive notes. There is an excellent index, but it would have been helpful to have a listing of Heinlein’s stories and the various titles they went through before magazine publication.
Patterson has ambitions that Heinlein’s life as a whole is also a reflection of the changes in America in the 20th century. I’m skeptical of that claim but very much looking forward to his attempt to prove it in Volume 2. “Learning Curve” is without doubt a major accomplishment for the history of science fiction.
Fred Cleaver is a freelancer who writes regularly about new science fiction.
