In 1933, he was assigned to the USS Roper, where he became seasick most of the time. By 1932, he would enter in a second marriage with Leslyn MacDonald, which lasted comparatively longer than his first one.

Much of his early years of service was spent on board the USS Lexington, where he worked as a radio communications officer. It is also around this time that he married Elinor Curry – a union that would prove to be short-lived. Navy after graduating in 1929 with a degree in naval engineering from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. In fact, many of his famous works like “Time Enough For Love” are set in and heavily influenced by his hometown, and he often wrote about its stifling conservative practices in a lot of his novels and short stories.Įqually influential to his writing is his 5-year service in the U.S. The time that he spent growing up in Kansas City would have a major impact on the type of fiction that he would write later in life. But he showed particular favoritism towards Olaf Stapledon’s sci-fi romances. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jules Verne. He enjoyed reading books by famous sci-fi and fantasy writers like H.G. He was such a voracious reader of such stories that he declared that he had read all the science fiction stories he could get his hands on by the age of 16. His destiny to become a great science fiction writer seemed apparent from the start, as young Heinlein was always seen in the Kansas City Public Library immersed in books of astronomy and science fiction.

Although Missouri was his birthplace, his family only stayed there for a few more months after his birth, before deciding to move to Kansas City where he would be spending most of his youth. He was the third son of Rex Ivar Heinlein and Bam Lyle Heinlein. Robert Anson Heinlein was born in Butler, Missouri on July 7, 1907. And, rightfully so, it is because of his eclectic works and achievements in the field that he became its first Grand Master in 1974. Heinlein helped usher in the “Golden Age of Science Fiction”, which is a period of time during the late 1930s leading up to the mid 1940s when science fiction gained a large audience and following, and numerous science fiction stories were published. Popularly known as the “Dean of Science Fiction Writers”, science fiction would not have achieved its status as a genre that could stand on its own without Robert A. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fictionīangs & Whimpers: Stories about The End of The World The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume II A

Galaxy Science Fiction, October-November 1970 Worlds to Come: New Science Fiction Adventures Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space

Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein