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Robert A. Heinlein: Volume I: Learning Curve, 1907–1948 Kindle Edition

by William H. Patterson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.6 176 ratings

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For the first time, the real story of the life of Robert A. Heinlein in the authorized biography

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) is generally considered the greatest American SF writer of the 20th century. A famous and bestselling author in later life, he started as a navy man and graduate of Annapolis who was forced to retire because of tuberculosis. A socialist politician in the 1930s, he became one of the sources of Libertarian politics in the USA in his later years. His most famous works include the Future History series (stories and novels collected in The Past Through Tomorrow and continued in later novels), Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Given his desire for privacy in the later decades of his life, he was both stranger and more interesting than one could ever have known. This is the first of two volumes of a major American biography. This volume is about Robert A. Heinlein's life up to the end of the 1940s and the mid-life crisis that changed him forever.

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Praise for Robert A. Heinlein:

“...He rewrote US sf as a whole in his own image. Robert A. Heinlein may have been the all-time most important writer of genre SF.”
--The Science Fiction Encyclopedia

“He made footsteps big enough for a whole country to follow. And it was our country that did it...We proceed down a path marked by his ideas. That’s legacy enough for any man. He showed us where the future is.”
--Tom Clancy

About the Author

William Patterson lives in San Francisco, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Robert A. Heinlein
1THE HEINLEINS OF BUTLER, MISSOURIButler, Missouri, has been the county seat and market town for Bates County since the resettlement of the "dark and bloody ground" after the Civil War. Eighty miles southeast of Kansas City, in 1907 it was in its third decade of sustained growth and had achieved a kind of stability that let its residents--most of them--enjoy what is now seen as a golden age of America, though in October of that year they were in for another depression, as debilitating as the savage depression of 1893.Both the Heinlein and Lyle families were well established in Butler. Rex Ivar Heinlein and Bam Lyle Heinlein grew up there (though Rex's father, Samuel Edward Heinlein, was a traveling salesman working out of Kansas City), and they began dating when both were attending Butler's Academy (the local equivalent of a college). Rex enlisted for the Spanish-American War, and when he came back, sick and "on a shutter," as family lore has it,1 they were married in November 1899.The couple immediately moved into Bam's parents' house--a common practice in the days before installment credit contracts brought the purchase of a house within the range of newlyweds. Extended families were the rule, and houses were built to accommodate generations living under the same roof. Even so, the Lyle ménage must have been crowded: Bam's six-year-old brother, Park, was living at home, and when her older sister, Anna, was widowed, leaving her to support her daughter, Thelma, by teaching, she, too, had gone back home to Butler and to her father's house.Fortunately, Dr. Lyle's horse-and-buggy medical practice was flourishing; even with the additional people in residence, he was able to indulge in trotting races as a hobby, running a fashionable sulky--a light cart with only a driver's seat--in the annual Bates County Fair, drawn by a half-brother of the famous Dan Patch.In 1899 Rex Ivar had prospects: he was working as a clerk and bookkeeperin his uncle Oscar Heinlein's dry goods store in Butler, a kind of combination hardware and general store. Uncle Oscar, in his mid-thirties, was unmarried and childless; it was understood that, if he applied himself and worked hard, Rex Ivar might inherit O. A. Heinlein Mercantile one day.2Rex Ivar and Bam started a family: their first child, a boy, was born on August 15, 1900. They named him Lawrence Lyle Heinlein, honoring grandparents on both sides of the family. On March 25, 1905, another boy was born. They named him Rex Ivar, after his father. A year later, Bam Heinlein became pregnant again.On July 7, 1907, not-quite-seven-year-old Larry Heinlein was delegated to keep his two-year-old brother, Rex, under control, at least till his father got home from work.3 Bam Lyle Heinlein was upstairs for her lying-in, attended by her father's office partner, Dr. Chastain, since it would have been improper for Dr. Lyle to attend his own daughter. Shortly after 3 P.M., she delivered a fine baby boy. They named him Robert Anson, after her great-grandparents Robert Lyle and Anson S. Wood.But by 1907 Rex Ivar's prospects in Butler no longer seemed quite so rosy. Like the biblical Jacob, he had served his uncle for seven years, and that was enough. The October stock market crash and Panic of 1907 threw the country into a depression. That winter Rex Ivar decided to give up on Butler and joined his father and uncles (plus aunt Jessie) in Kansas City.Rex Ivar's father, Samuel Edward Heinlein, had been in Kansas City for some years, working as a traveling salesman for the Kansas-Moline Plow Company. In 1903 he moved to the Midland Manufacturing Company, where his brothers Harvey and Lawrence also got work as salesmen and his sister Jessie was a clerk. In 1906 Samuel Edward was promoted from traveling salesman and assistant manager to full manager for Midland Manufacturing (soon to become Midland Implements, Jobbers of Implements & Vehicles), and with the attendant raise he bought a larger house. In December 1907 Rex and Bam and the three boys moved into his father's house. Rex Ivar, too, started out as a traveling salesman for Midland, and Robert remembered being taken several times by his mother to the train station at the foot of Wyandotte (building torn down in 1914) to meet his father returning home from his sales route.4 Soon, however, Midlands promoted him to clerk and cashier, and he was able to rent a small house of his own at 2605 Cleveland.5 Now Rex and Bam felt truly launched in Kansas City.6 They would work hard and strive--and have many more children.Robert Anson was an easy baby for his mother. She later said he gave no trouble and always entertained himself.7 Robert later recalled that he was fedon Eagle Brand condensed and sweetened milk, rather than breastfed like the rest of the children.8 No explanation for this has survived. Sometimes it just happens that lactation does not start.Robert's infancy cannot have been easy for him, though: a middle child, between the older boys and the new babies that came one by one, he was outcompeted for his mother's attention. He said on several occasions that he was a stammerer as a young man, and stammering is often associated with family disturbances during the time when a child is learning to speak, roughly from about ages two through five--for Robert, that was from 1909 through 1912.9 Bam seems to have preferred her father's day-to-day care during her pregnancies (there are no records of perinatal doctoring or midwifery), and she spent a great deal of time in her father's house in the early days.A baby girl, Louise, arrived on February 27, 1909. In 1910 Midland failed and went out of business. In 1911 brothers Samuel and Harvey Wallace Heinlein put the Heinlein family's expertise to work and set up their own company--Heinlein Brothers, Agricultural Implements--across the street from the old Midlands site. Rex Ivar was their clerk-cashier.10He was thirty-one years old; he was also sickly and had a series of operations during Robert's childhood. Work, church, and politics left very little time to spend with the family. When Bobby was five years old, he noticed unusual tension in the house; he later found out his father had received word from a local doctor that he had only three months to live--a false alarm, it turned out.11The children shared two bedrooms, with the smallest children in a crib in the parents' bedroom. Nor were there enough beds to go around. Heinlein recalled as an adult that he slept on a pallet on the floor for years, in a constant state of amiable warfare with baby sister Louise, "a notorious pillow-swiper (with nine in the family, pillows were at a premium) clear back when she pronounced the word pillow as 'pidduh.'"12As is common in large families, the older children had to help raise the younger. Bobby adored his oldest brother, Lawrence, but not brother Rex. Rex was only two years older, but gave himself privileges Bobby did not appreciate. A family anecdote from about 1911 or 1912 illustrates the problem: Rex came running in to their mother complaining--tattling--that Bobby was standing by the curb and saying hello to everybody who came along, and Rex didn't approve of that.13 Rex continued trying to raise his brother for a very long time, and this was a source of strain between them as they grew older.On September 10, 1912, another boy was born, Jesse (later called "Jay")Clare, named for his Aunt Jessie. Then Rose Elizabeth on July 23, 1918, named apparently for the paternal and maternal grandmothers, Rose Adelia Wood and Elizabeth Johnson (much as Robert Anson had been named for the grandfathers). Mary Jean, arriving on Christmas Day in 1920, rounded out the family at seven children. Bam Heinlein was forty-one years old.Until 1914 Bam and the children went by train to live with Dr. Lyle in Butler during summers and holidays. There she and the children could get out from under many of the pressures and privations of their life in Kansas City and Bam could let the children run (relatively) free in the cleaner, rural environment. Rex Ivar was bound to his desk in Kansas City, joining them when he could get away--weekends occasionally; a full week when possible. (In 1909 he had taken a temporary job with a bank in Butler while Bam was pregnant with Louise.)14Young Bobby seems to have been a particular favorite of Dr. Lyle's, and the affection was certainly reciprocated; Dr. Lyle built a special seat in his sulky for the boy, so he could accompany him on his medical rounds. Dr. Lyle did not shield the realities from the boy: outside the very largest and most advanced hospitals, medical practice consisted of iodine and aspirin, and encouraging people to heal themselves.15 Years later, Robert remembered seeing Dr. Lyle burn and bury his instruments after an infectious disease case, possibly anthrax.16Dr. Lyle also taught Bobby to play chess at age four. As Dr. Lyle died in August 1914, when his grandson had just turned seven years old, these incidents must have made a very deep impression on him. Heinlein was to take Dr. Lyle as his pattern for all the American frontier virtues of intellectual range and toughness, patriotism, and pragmatic morality in his fictional portrait of Lazarus Long's grandfather, Dr. Ira Johnson, in Time Enough for Love (1973) and To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987).But Kansas City was home, more and more. The Heinleins had an almost proprietary, family interest in Swope Park, since an uncle Ira (who had married Bobby's Aunt Jessie) worked for the city, and he drew for his own amusement a detailed map locating every rock and shrub in the park (he also achieved renown for collecting a large ball of twine).17 Later, Heinlein recalled stripping and playing naked in the park, before World War I, pretending he was Tarzan.18 Nakedness became an important sensual experience for him. Years later, for fictional purposes, he r...

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003OUXEFQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books; First edition (August 17, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 17, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2663 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 623 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #417,246 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #47 in Science Fiction & Fantasy Literary Criticism (Kindle Store)
- #228 in Science Fiction History & Criticism
- #659 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors

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4.6 176 ratings

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Terry S

A Remarkable Biography of Heinlein, The Man

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2011

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The "juvenile" science fiction novels of Robert A. Heinlein, such as "Space Cadet," "Starman Jones," "Red Planet" and "Have Space Suit--Will Travel," had a huge influence on me when I was growing up. The far-out stories of Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke (Isaac Asimov, not so much) were major reasons for my youthful fascination with spaceflight, and steered me inexorably to an aerospace engineering career, during which I still eagerly read every word Heinlein wrote. "Stranger in a Strange Land" mesmerized me, to the extent that I marked passages in it with a yellow highlighter--I still have that defaced first edition hardcover in my library! But then something happened. Heinlein's later books, such as "I Will Fear No Evil," "To Sail Beyond the Sunset" and "The Number of the Beast," left me cold. And I know exactly why. The plots were still pretty interesting, and his writing style was as dynamic, fast-paced and breathlessly readable as ever. But his obsession with pregnant female characters interested only in having babies became unbearably irritating to me, and ended up spoiling the books entirely.

Heinlein expert William H. Patterson, Jr., with the full cooperation of Heinlein's widow Virginia and with unprecedented access to Heinlein's archives, notes and personal papers, has produced the first volume of a planned two-volume biography. "Learning Curve" spans the years 1907 through 1948, and thus stops well short of covering the period when Heinlein wrote some of his most impressive and important works. But his output during his first decade of writing (his first story, "Life-Line," was published in 1939) was nothing short of astounding (pun intended) in quantity, quality and influence on the genre. Many of the stories he wrote during that time were part of his justly famed "Future History" series, tied together in a rough but cohesive structure of days to come. By the end of that decade, he had just started to turn out his first juveniles, and the world of science fiction would never be the same.

Mr. Patterson's effort is equally astounding. He does a superb job of capturing the nature of the man behind the books and stories. I initially thought the parts about Heinlein's childhood and the time he spent at the Naval Academy and in the Navy before World War II would be a little boring, but I was wrong. The entire story is fascinating, well-told, fast-moving and easy to read. Many of the insights into Heinlein's character and motivations come from letters he exchanged with friends, fellow authors, editors, fans, etc., and Mr. Patterson quotes at length from this correspondence. One hundred pages of endnotes add specific citations and further information without interrupting the narrative. Once Mr. Patterson gets to the point in Heinlein's life when he began writing regularly, I was spellbound. The details of how many of his most memorable stories came to be, in the form we avid readers know them, are captivating. We learn about working titles, word counts, editorial demands for changes, payment rates, what it took in those pre-computer days to type a "clean" manuscript, and other minutia of the creative writing and science fiction marketing process. I'll never look at "By His Bootstraps," "The Green Hills of Earth" and "They" (to name just a few) the same way after learning what really went into creating and polishing them. This is absolutely fantastic stuff that ANY science fiction fan, young or old, should really enjoy. Buy "Learning Curve," read it, enjoy it--you can't go wrong.

I'll have to wait until Volume 2 is published to find out what happened in Heinlein's life to send him `round the bend with his fixation on pregnancies in his later works. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to re-reading a lot of his old classic stories...

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John Walker

Excellent first volume of the biography of a grandmaster of science fiction

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2019

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Robert Heinlein came from a family who had been present in America before there were the United States, and whose members had served in all of the wars of the Republic. Despite being thin, frail, and with dodgy eyesight, he managed to be appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy where, despite demerits for being a hellion, he graduated and was commissioned as a naval officer. He was on the track to a naval career when felled by tuberculosis (which was, in the 1930s, a potential death sentence, with the possibility of recurrence any time in later life).

Heinlein had written while in the Navy, but after his forced medical retirement, turned his attention to writing science fiction for pulp magazines, and after receiving a cheque for US$ 70 for his first short story, “Life-Line”, he exclaimed, “How long has this racket been going on? And why didn't anybody tell me about it sooner?” Heinlein always viewed writing as a business, and kept a thermometer on which he charted his revenue toward paying off the mortgage on his house.

While Heinlein fit in very well with the Navy, and might have been, absent medical problems, a significant commander in the fleet in World War II, he was also, at heart, a bohemian, with a soul almost orthogonal to military tradition and discipline. His first marriage was a fling with a woman who introduced him to physical delights of which he was unaware. That ended quickly, and then he married Leslyn, who was his muse, copy-editor, and business manager in a marriage which persisted throughout World War II, when both were involved in war work. Leslyn worked herself in this effort into insanity and alcoholism, and they divorced in 1947.

It was Robert Heinlein who vaulted science fiction from the ghetto of the pulp magazines to the “slicks” such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. This was due to a technological transition in the publishing industry which is comparable to that presently underway in the migration from print to electronic publishing. Rationing of paper during World War II helped to create the “pocket book” or paperback publishing industry. After the end of the war, these new entrants in the publishing market saw a major opportunity in publishing anthologies of stories previously published in the pulps. The pulp publishers viewed this as an existential threat—who would buy a pulp magazine if, for almost the same price, one could buy a collection of the best stories from the last decade in all of those magazines?

Heinlein found his fiction entrapped in this struggle. While today, when you sell a story to a magazine in the U.S., you usually only sell “First North American serial rights”, in the 1930s and 1940s, authors sold all rights, and it was up to the publisher to release their rights for republication of a work in an anthology or adaptation into a screenplay. This is parallel to the contemporary battle between traditional publishers and independent publishing platforms, which have become the heart of science fiction.

Heinlein was complex. While an exemplary naval officer, he was a nudist, married three times, interested in the esoteric (and a close associate of Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard ). He was an enthusiastic supporter of Upton Sinclair's EPIC movement and his “Social Credit” agenda.

This authorised biography, with major contributions from Heinlein's widow, Virginia, chronicles the master storyteller's life in his first forty years—until he found, or created, an audience receptive to the tales of wonder he spun. If you've read all of Heinlein's fiction, it may be difficult to imagine how much of it was based in Heinlein's own life. If you thought Heinlein's later novels were weird, appreciate how the master was weird before you were born.

I had the privilege of meeting Robert and Virginia Heinlein in 1984. I shall always cherish that moment.

8 people found this helpful

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Ed B

Detailed if a bit dry

Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2010

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For someone looking for a detailed, comprehensive biography of Heinlein, this book definitely will be a highly satisfactory read. It includes a lot of information on his family, his career with the U.S. Navy, his early life and radical left-wing political activities. All of this creates a compelling picture of a high-spirited, very impetuous individual.

The book is a little less satisfactory (and for this reason gets 4 instead of 5 stars) when describing his early writing career. It does have a lot of specific details on what works he completed, the interaction with editors and fans, and his transition from the "pulp" to the "slick" fiction markets. However, you don't get as much of a feel for how this changed his view of himself or his political beliefs. I was particularly looking for some background on the interaction between Heinlein and John W. Campbell, and while there are some excerpts from letters relating to the business relationship, there is little on the political side. Two such strong personalities, coming from very different political viewpoints, must have clashed at least in a friendly way on many occasions!

There seems to have been some intention to write a more academic or formal biography, and as a result the kind of anecdote or humorous story that would be found throughout a popular work is largely absent here. Possibly there just weren't the sources to draw from - almost all of the people who knew Heinlein closely from the '30s and '40s are gone now.

Overall, a highly recommended book that illuminates one of (if not the) major SF authors of the 20th century.

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Miguel Angel Alonso Pulido

Me ha encantado

Reviewed in Spain on December 22, 2017

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Robert A. Heinlein es uno de mis autores favoritos, así que cuando su biografía estuvo a un precio razonable en Kindle, la compré al momento y empecé a devorarla con ganas. En este primer volumen, el autor nos ofrece un cuadro de las primeras cuatro décadas de vida de Heinlein, desde su infancia hasta su tercer matrimonio, pasando por sus años en la Marina, sus devaneos con la política y sus inicios como escritor de ciencia ficción, interrumpidos por la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Se trata de un recorrido fascinante por la vida increíble de un escritor que marcó a varias generaciones de lectores y lo he disfrutado como un enano. Totalmente recomendado si eres fan de Heinlein.

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Dr. Tim Parker

A bio with commentary, worth reading for sure

Reviewed in Canada on July 2, 2014

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Robert Heinlein is, along with Azimov, one of the two "big" stars in the SF firmament. His books had a remarkable impression on many young people, myself included, both in their details and in their scope. Without getting too "far out", Heinlein painted verbal mosaics of things to come, making future history both believable and humanistic. I couldn't get enough of his books, reading many of them several times as a teen. Even now, revisiting his works through this biography, I will go back and reread some of my favorites.

First and foremost this is a biography of one of SF's greatest writers. His personal history and how he got involved in the SF field has been known for decades, but Patterson does a great job of bringing the stories into a cohesive timeline and entertaining the reader along the way. There's stuff here I didn't know, despite reading Heinlein's own words on his life. His autobiographies were lacking some of the detail Patterson brings, whether intentionally or not seems to depend on the subject!

More than a biography, though, this is also a tribute, with stories about Heinlein and his works from fans, critics, and general public. In some ways, those are the more interesting parts of this book, leading you to a deeper appreciated of RAH's work and influence. The book's writing is eminently readable, leading you through the chapters. And while this is a thick book (reminiscent of some of RAH's novels!) the time and pages go fast, drawing you on through the book.

After reading this, I was struck by several things: how little I knew about RAH (despite reading all his published work including autobiographies); how much influence RAH had on SF; how much influence RAH had on me, personally; and...when do we get Volume 2? If you have any interest in the great era of SF, or interest in the seminal novelist of the golden age, then this is a superb book to read.

Verde

Interessante, ma...

Reviewed in Italy on June 17, 2014

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Inizio subito dal punto più dolente: una inaccuratezza difficile da scusare.
A pagina 347 risulta che "...Mussolini was torn to pieces by a mob in Rome and his broken body hung from a lamppost...". Come si può leggere agevolmente anche sulla edizione inglese di Wikipedia, Mussolini fu ucciso da una formazione partigiana disciplinata militarmente e che ne aveva ricevuto l'ordine dal CLN, non da una folla in tumulto; fu ucciso a Mezzegra vicino al lago di Como, a 650 chilometri da Roma; fu appeso a un distributore di benzina e non a un lampione.
Spero che in tutto il resto la ricerca del biografo sia stata più accurata, ma uno svarione del genere me ne fa molto dubitare.
Per il resto la storia è scritta bene, nel senso della scorrevolezza, ma l'autore manca della capacità di riassumere gli episodi. Scopro che eventi che sembrano essere quasi insignificanti (per me, ma per quanto se ne capisce anche per Heinlein) sono trattati abbondantemente e altri che mi paiono molto più interessanti sono solo menzionati. Forse in parte ciò è conseguenza della stesura in due volumi. Nel complesso un libro che si fa leggere, e probabilmente la biografia di RAH più completa che avremo mai. Se siete fan compratela pure, non saranno soldi buttati. Ma non è neppure un capolavoro-che-non-bisogna-perdere. Magari prima -se fate parte di un'associazione, ad esempio- compratene una copia collettiva, prima di decidere che volete la vostra copia personale.

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Eric Picholle

La biographie définitive

Reviewed in France on June 16, 2014

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Une biographie à l'américaine, bourrée de faits et d''anecdotes plutôt que de commentaires, par l'un des meilleurs connaisseurs de la vie de Robert Heinlein.

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Nilsson Tommy

A classic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 20, 2013

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Mr. Heinlein has lived an interesting life and was a man far ahead of his time, especially considering his upbringing. The book covers it all and makes you believe you knew the guy. Splendid reading.

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