Wonderful authorize biography of the Dean of American Science Fiction, covering childhood, Annapolis, Navy career ended by illness, early writing career, and political activism. The book ends at the verge of turning from short story writer to novelist. Illuminating and insightful. All boomers started reading science fiction with Heinlein's juveniles, reading about rockets to the moon, spaceships, terraforming, generation starships, and other exciting topis that wetted our appetites. Read this book. ( )

Because the two volumes of William Patterson's biography of Robert Heinlein make up a single work, and because most readers who finish the first volume will want to proceed to the second, this is a combined review of both volumes.

Patterson has poured as much time and research into this big biography of Heinlein as typically goes into a life of a major historical figure, and the result is engrossing, especially the first volume. Heinlein overcame a childhood of emotional neglect, a lack of financial resources, and a highly sensitive nature to enter the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he withstood harsh conditions and (especially in the first year) brutal hazing, and achieved what could have been expected to be a secure, lifetime career as a naval officer, only to be permanently retired in his 20s by ill health. Recovering, he entered politics as a socialist candidate for the California Assembly, knocking on every door in his district--no easy task for a man on the introverted side of the spectrum--only to be defeated by a few hundred votes. When the Japanese attacked in 1941, he applied immediately to be returned to active duty, but was denied due to his authorship of a bitter public letter protesting police brutality almost eight years previous. Undefeated, he relocated to Philadelphia to work in a civilian defense plant, where his coworkers included fellow writers Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp. As the war ended, his marriage of 15 years broke up as he fell in love with the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life. The first volume ends there; the second details his life with Virginia (Ginny) Gerstenfeld Heinlein, and covers the period during which he was most famous and productive.

Patterson covers all this in great detail--no small feat after most of the major players have died and the traces of some, including his former wife Leslyn, have been largely obliterated. At times the detail is a bit more than necessary, but usually the picture is vivid and illuminating, and judiciously rendered. (The habit some 20th century people had of keeping carbon copies of their correspondence is a biographers' godsend.) The exception, and it's a big one, is in his treatment of Leslyn, an intelligent and vivacious woman who could hardly have been more important to the first half of Heinlein's life, but of whom few historical traces remain, since she had little public life, and the bulk of her letters were destroyed. Patterson's main source and patron for this biography wsa Ginny, Leslyn's successor wife, whose disdain for Leslyn appears to have been boundless. Carol McGuirk of SF Studies points out that "Leslyn’s index entries (“affairs,” “alcoholic deterioration,” “badmouthing of Heinlein,” “bouts of rage,” etc.) speak volumes about the biographer’s special pleading for Virginia Heinlein’s version of this part of Heinlein’s story....When Leslyn discovered that her brother-in-law had been shot and then burned alive in a Philippine prison after months of torture, her depression deepened further. Stress and grief surely had their part in wrecking the marriage, yet Leslyn bears all responsibility. Another index entry on Leslyn includes four references to “psychotic episodes”; yet going back to the pages, one finds passages that fail to document any such thing: “she just locked herself in an enraged frame of mind” (221), “the psychotic episodes went away” (350), “Leslyn was confined to bed in a state of mind that could only be called psychotic” (415), and she was showing “flashes of temper” (537 n24). Only in a grudging footnote does Patterson concede that in 1950 Leslyn joined Alcoholics Anonymous and that she remarried twice, dying in 1981."

Otherwise, where gaps need to be filled in and conjecture must be resorted to, Patterson is for the most part reasonable and open about how he reached his conclusions. His adulation of his subject goes over the top mostly in the endnotes, where he can't resist explaining what makes a particular story so ahead of its time, and advocates for Heinlein's views of religion or politics too defensively. Patterson really gets up on a soapbox as he repeatedly lectures the reader about classical versus modern liberalism, by way of arguing that Heinlein's essential politics never changed. It's not a convincing argument, given that the one-time socialist candidate became an intense supporter of presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, and dropped friends with more nuanced views of the Communist threat to America.

Patterson was not the first writer authorized to write Heinlein's biography. Dr. Leon Stover, an anthropologist, first worked on it before his access to Heinlein's papers and archives was revoked by Ginny. Patterson says that this was due to her "concern at the amount of rumor Stover was soliciting and not fact-checking with her"--in other words, at his widening his sources and attempting to paint a balanced portrait. Her action apparently succeeded, in that getting any sense of Heinlein's flaws as a writer, husband, or friend requires an extremely careful reading between the lines combined with considerable informed speculation.

Overall, however, the picture is of a talented and admirable man who would not have succeeded were it not for many times the usual measure of self-discipline, resilience, and the confidence that comes as a result of both. Heinlein was in many ways more interesting than one might have guessed from reading his novels and stories. I'm grateful to William Patterson for preserving this rich record, however incomplete, of an unusual and fascinating human being. ( )

The first volume of William H. Patterson's magisterial authorized biography of science fiction patriarch Robert A. Heinlein covers an immense amount of ground, including all of Heinlein's life prior to his work as a writer, work that he came to out of need as a third career. He had previously retired from the US Navy and worked as a political campaigner, primarily with the socialist EPIC movement in California associated with Upton Sinclair. This book spans all three of Heinlein's marriages, his complete writing career in the pulps, his Manana Literary Society, his engineering work for the military in World War II, and his entry into the "slicks" and book authorship.

In a very minor point, I was amused at Patterson's being stumped by a private Heinlein manuscript that mentions "Bljdf" (57), which is to my mind certainly "Alice" (a simple substitution cipher with the second letter evading encryption), i.e. Alice Catherine McBee (45).

The chief nugget I was seeking in the deep mine of this hefty tome is on page 374, where Patterson recounts Heinlein's attendance at an Agape Lodge (Pasadena) O.T.O. Gnostic Mass in December 1945. There is a little sloppiness of detail here--Patterson characterizes the Gnostic Mass uncharitably as "a theatrical piece, rather than a true religious rite" and manages to botch every one of his three direct quotes from Liber Legis in a long explanatory endnote (569-70). But his access to Heinlein's archives inspires confidence in his un-sourced remark that Heinlein kept "for research" the congregational missal sheet and copy of The Book of the Law he had received from the lodge.

I'm honestly feeling a fair amount of relief at having finished both hefty volumes of this work. I wish they were in my local public library for the convenience of my ongoing research, but now that I've read them and taken my notes, they've both been returned to the interlibrary system that furnished them to me. They were not quite so compelling or obviously useful that I'll want to acquire them for my own durable collection.

For the complete Patterson review of the 2-volumes biography, see review on my blog.

I’ve selected a few texts in direct speech, to illustrate some of his ideas, which I think worth retaining, because they help us understand the man as well as the writer (many more could have been extracted).

Volume 1:

“How long this racket has been going on? And why didn’t anybody tell me about it sooner?” (when Heinlein made the first sale to Campbell: “Life-Line”)
“I have been writing the Horatio Alger books of this generation, always with the same strongly moral purpose that runs through every line of the Alger books (which strongly influenced me; I read them all):
“Honesty is the best policy.”
“Hard work is rewarded.”
“There is no easy road to success.”
“Courage above all.”
“Studying hard pays off, in happiness as well as in money.”
“Stand on you own feet.”
“Don’t ever be bullied.”
“Take your medicine.”
“The world always has a place for a man who works, but none for the lazy.”
These are the things that the Alger books said to me, in the idiom suited to my generation; I believed them when I read them, I believe them now, and I have tried to say them to a younger generation which I believe has been shamefully neglected by many of the elders responsible of its moral training.” (now we understand where the “competence” theme comes from…)


You can read the rest of this review on my blog. ( )

This is a bio of who some say is the greatest science fiction writer. I had already read Asimov's autobiiography. This is similar especially the parts about the early rejections and the relationship with their Editor John Campbell at the science fiction magazine Analog. Heinlein did have an interesting life. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy but had to leave the Navy for health reasons. He then had a fling in California as a left wing politician. He then during WW II worked for the Army in research with DeCamp and Asimov. He had three wives and by the time he married the third wife he had become more conservative. The early left wing politician would never have written Star Ship Troopers. Heinlein continued to develop since he was able to write such ground-breaking works as the Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land. This book is very thorugh abouit describing his writing life and why he left John Campbell to write for the slicks (Saturday Evening Post, etc.) more money! I am not sure I am going to tackle ( )