INTRODUCTION

Learning Curve, the first volume of this biography, took Heinlein from his birth in 1907 through his naval career, destroyed by tuberculosis; a political career that ended in a personally disastrous political campaign; and a writing career that succeeded beyond anything he could imagine—only to be interrupted by the demands of engineering for World War II. After the war, his writing began to pick up again—but his fifteen-year marriage to Leslyn MacDonald Heinlein fell apart. After a year he was ready to remarry, a naval lieutenant he had met in Philadelphia during his war work.

It was a period of ups and downs—Heinlein’s learning curve in the most literal sense. By 1948 he was coming to the crest of the curve, having learned better in many ways, with many more to come. But the core of his mind, formed as a radical liberal early in the twentieth century, held those values even as the world shifted around him. In particular, the leftward shift of American politics after World War II (among conservatives as well as liberals) put Heinlein in a widening gulf of values, increasingly at odds with both left and right. Heinlein engaged with his world, and his grappling was uncomfortable but necessary. Toward the end, as his personal fame grew, he became paradoxically almost invisible, and even his most approving readers reacted more to crude labels than to the actual content of his writing. More and more plainly he set out his message—“Again and again, what are the facts?”—and his readership grew into the millions, needing the affirmation of reason that includes the spiritual. The final products of his fertile imagination, dealing with taboos broken, men like gods, and a society, in Freud’s terms, polymorphous perverse, are in no real sense the product of a “conservative” or “rightist” mentality.

By the time of his marriage to Virginia Gerstenfeld in 1948 (her first, his third), Robert Heinlein was halfway through his life, and he was essentially done with false starts. After the collapse of his marriage to Leslyn MacDonald, he had a long and painful creative dry spell, but he persevered and gradually discovered how to make his postwar “propaganda purposes” work, how to teach his fellow citizens (the current ones, as well as the teenagers who would move into responsible adulthood) how to live in, and how to take control of, their increasingly technology-dominated future. It was important work and satisfying, and for the new life he was building, at age forty, Virginia Heinlein was to become his perfect partner, in his writing business as well as in his life, steadily taking over the business aspects of his career so that he could concentrate on the art.

New markets continued to open up for Heinlein, and, so gradually he was never really aware of it, he became more than a successful popular writer in the mold of Erle Stanley Gardner or Rex Stout: He became a culture-figure, a public moralist, something like the role H. G. Wells had filled in the 1920s, and Mark Twain before him—but in a public much less open to moralizing, much more open to an irony that shells out important truths in the guise of fictions.

Although Heinlein died in 1988, his entire body of writing remains in print, selling even more widely than during his lifetime. Warren Buffett had not yet brought “value investing” back into currency at the time of Heinlein’s death, but value investing is exactly what Heinlein engaged in for the last forty years of his life—investing in us (often as irony cast upon the waters, which comes back sevenfold!).