ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, “Aes Triplex”
Praise for The Authorized Biography of Robert A. Heinlein, Volume 1
“The field has long needed a comprehensive biography of Robert A. Heinlein, a complex and contradictory figure to whom every subsequent science fiction writer owes a major debt—whether they realize it or not. If you ever enjoyed Heinlein, you’ll find this fascinating … and even if you don’t, you ought to read it just for the picture it draws of the early days of the science fiction genre, and of early-twentieth-century America in general.”
—Gardner Dozois
“Though Volume 1 of Patterson’s biography ends with the bright note of [Heinlein’s] third and final walk down the aisle, it’s the almost desperate nomadic quality that resonates. Any reader who has come this far will be eager to see how the rest of Heinlein’s long life will play out. There are forty more years to go.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A majestic biography of the grandest of science fiction’s grand masters. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the development of science fiction in the twentieth century.”
—Robert Silverberg
“The author clearly has a handle on every moment of Heinlein’s life, including the unpleasant (a nasty divorce) and controversial (trash-talking L. Ron Hubbard) episodes … . A welcome account of the development of an important popular writer.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Robert A. Heinlein was the author that every science fiction writer of my generation emulated. His work defined the field.”
—Ben Bova
“Patterson offers a meticulous life portrait of America’s most pivotal science fiction author. In following Robert Heinlein’s journey, step by step, we come to understand the persistent themes of his work. Perseverance, compassion, courage, curiosity, and—above all—a drive to confront the future on its own terms, eye-to-eye.”
—David Brin
“In life as in much of his fiction, he pushed the boundaries of his time, and this deep look at his early years shows where all that came from, plus much more.”
—Gregory Benford
“At last, a comprehensive biography of the man who shaped modern science fiction. This is an enthralling account of how, step by step, Robert A. Heinlein invented himself and his art. I can hardly wait for the next volume.”
—Michael Swanwick
“A fine American biography and a fascinating read. William H. Patterson has crafted a thorough and worthy tribute to one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.”
—Greg Bear
“William Patterson not only makes you feel as if you’re walking side by side with Robert Heinlein from his boyhood days in Missouri all the way through to his war years, but Patterson also brings the time periods to life as well. This biography will fascinate not only science fiction fans but anyone interested in one of the great writers who shaped our modern world.”
—Laurence Yep
“I had the privilege of reading most of this book in manuscript, and still happily paid for a hardcover copy. I recommend it most highly. Mr. Patterson’s scholarship and grasp of period are striking, and he has an instinct for the heart of a story. There should be surprises here even for serious Heinlein students. Can’t be sure until we’ve seen Volume 2, of course—but Mr. Patterson may just have grokked Robert in fullness. (And Leslyn. And Ginny.)”
—Spider Robinson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When Virginia Heinlein called on January 1, 2000, to ask me to write a formal biography of her husband, neither of us had quite the vision of the gargantuan thing it was to become.
What I did not know was that Mrs. Heinlein had been searching for a biographer for more than a decade. She had even tried her own hand at writing it but did not feel equal to the task. Brad Linaweaver, the mutual friend who introduced us, later told me that he knew before anyone—before Ginny, even—that I was the biographer she had been searching for. Brad has supported this biography above-and-beyond for all the years it has taken to get it into print: Brad Linaweaver is truly the grandfather of this biography.
It is more than a conventional grace note to say that this biography would literally not have been possible without the full support and cooperation of Virginia Heinlein. She opened doors, made rough places plain, introduced me to friends and family—to Eleanor Wood, literary agent extraordinaire, and to Rita Bottoms, Head of Special Collections and Archives of the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Mrs. Bottoms’s help with the Robert A. Heinlein Archive, then mostly sealed, in the months before she retired was generous—and as nothing to the help she has given in the years since.
Some of Ginny’s introductions came too late: all of Heinlein’s contemporaries would have been in their eighties and nineties; almost all were already gone. An interview Ginny arranged with Admiral Ignatius “Pete” Gallantin, Retired (U.S. Naval Academy, Class of 1933), provided information and insight about the Naval Academy during Heinlein’s tenure there. Admiral Gallantin did not live to see the end results of his help.
Other introductions were fruitful and multiplied from generation to generation: an e-mail exchange with Kathy Petty, one of Heinlein’s grandnieces, was the first of many discussions with other surviving family members, and particularly the genealogists and family historians of that generation, Andrew Lermer, Jr., and William Ivar Bacchus. It was through Bill Bacchus’s good offices that I was privileged to interview Dorothy Martin Heinlein (Robert Heinlein’s sister-in-law), then aged ninety-two. Sitting around the table with many of the generation of Heinlein’s nieces and nephews in 2007 at the Centennial celebration of Heinlein’s birth was a wonderful experience—and this roomful of bright, quick, wry, and witty Heinleins gave me a faint taste of what young Robert Heinlein’s family dinners must have been like.
But the biography benefited, as well, from the myriad inputs of an interested Heinlein community. Individuals shared anecdotes, tape recordings, and historical research to illuminate the subject. As well as sound advice on the writing, Philippe Paine provided special expertise as an historical researcher, digging through crumbling, seventy-five-year-old rental records in Kansas City to uncover the traces left by Elinor Curry Heinlein. Thanks are owed, as well, to Debra Houdek and Geo Rule, Missouri and Civil War historians, who independently researched Robert Heinlein’s first wife but chose not to exercise their right to publish first so that the biography could have the privilege instead. Such forbearance is not humanly credible. I suspect angelic intervention.
Dr. Robert James, friend and invaluable critic, reviewed the manuscript at various stages. Special thanks are due, also, to James D. Gifford, who is in a sense the founder of the new generation of the Heinlein community. Jim Gifford was characteristically generous to this newcomer, sharing research materials he had developed over decades. His groundbreaking Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader’s Companion laid the foundation and plan of a broad city, of which this book is but one ornament. He also, along with Peter Scott and Tim Kyger, took on most of the burden of the 2007 Heinlein Centennial celebration, which allowed the editorial revision of this book to proceed apace. Tim Kyger, longtime friend and space and aerospace professional lobbyist, also monitored the narrative of the aerospace history in which Heinlein was involved.
The late Dr. Phillip Homer Owenby shared his extensive 1994 taped interviews with Mrs. Heinlein to supplement those I made in 2000–2002. The late Leon Stover, Ph.D., Litt.D, allowed me to read and take extensive notes of his unpublished biography of Robert Heinlein, Before the Writing Began, as well as to assist slightly in readying it for submission—an act of particular generosity. For recovery and access to records, thanks are due to L. N. Collier, Esq.; Bill Higgins and Bill Mullins; Charles W. Miller, Ph.D.; and Beth Simmons as well as four generations of the Mosch family of professional miners in Colorado, whose records exceed those of the state.
The assistance of literally hundreds of indivi
duals is gratefully appreciated, even though I cannot name all of them here. Any errors or infelicities, however, are my own and no reflection on their generosity.
Thanks also are due to my editor, David Hartwell. No better-prepared editor could have been found anywhere in the field.
And, last if not in any way least, to the Trustees of the Heinlein Prize Trust, Arthur M. Dula, J. Buckner Hightower, and James Miller Vaughn, Jr., whose continuing support of this project has been outstanding and indispensable.
WILLIAM H. PATTERSON, JR.
APPENDIX A
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Robert Heinlein was, like a great many of his relatives, interested in his family history both in America and in Europe before his great-great-great-grandfather immigrated here before the Revolutionary War. He was, furthermore, proud of the family tradition that Heinleins had fought in every American war. Kept out of combat in World War II himself, he supported his many friends in the armed forces—“Killer Cal” Laning, John Arwine, Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson, and L. Ron Hubbard—and he was awed and inspired by his brothers’ parts in the conflict: Lawrence Lyle Heinlein, who rose through the ranks from private to major general, was one of the handful of Americans who made up the Japanese occupation forces for a few weeks in August and September 1945. Jay Clare was in the first small force occupying Korea. It was their proud tradition as well as his own.
When he was able to travel in Europe, Heinlein made a point of finding out about the Heinlein and Lyle ancestors in Germany and in Ireland, and of sharing his findings with the other members of the Heinlein Family Association. Interest in Heinlein and Lyle family genealogy continues unabated in the next generation, and the special assistance of two of Heinlein’s nephews knowledgeable in family lore, William Ivar Bacchus and Andrew Lermer, Jr., in putting together this appendix is acknowledged with gratitude.
The name “Heinlein” was originally—meaning before the family came to America—a moderately common Bavarian Catholic name. Even though the Heinleins have a lively interest in their family genealogy, the ground is confused because of multiple immigrations to the United States, at different times, deriving from different branches of the same family and from entirely different families. There were apparently two Heinlein families that came to the United States at about the same time in the mid-eighteenth century, both coming through Philadelphia and settling first in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. While this is a curious coincidence, it is not particularly startling: William Penn had traveled extensively in the Low Countries and the Rhineland to promote his proprietorship in the New World, and any converts deriving from Penn’s proselytizing would naturally come through Philadelphia and make their way to the area being settled at the time.
The Heinleins of southern Germany were not necessarily all part of the same large family; the surname was adopted by unrelated families of peasants in Bavaria, the Rhineland, and Alsace when surnames began to be used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—although Robert Heinlein once indicated that he had found reference to the name existing prior to the eleventh century. In another place he said that the earliest use of the name he had been able to discover dates from A.D. 1290 and refers to “Isaak Heinlein,” a farmer in the Trier region of the Palatinate. An achievement at arms was awarded to one Josef Heinlein of Stuttgard in A.D. 1652. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the family from which Robert Heinlein descended is presumed to have been based in the southern German city of Nuremberg. Heinlein himself traced a Nuremberg goldsmith in his distant ancestry and on that basis suspected that the name might once have been Jewish.
I encountered a number of Heinleins in south Germany and the city records of Nuremberg show that a “Peter Henlein” whose statue is there actually spelled his name as you and I do—I conjecture that the name was originally “Heimlein.”1
“Heimlein” might mean “little secret.” “Heinlein” might mean “little moor.” At any rate, “Uncle Peter” (as Robert Heinlein’s brother Lawrence jokingly referred to him2 ) had a statue—and a postage stamp!—because he invented the watch escapement.
Lutheranism predominates in northern Germany and indeed all the Baltic countries, but there are significant numbers of Roman Catholics in southern Germany. The family lost its association with Catholicism in America.
The founder of the American branch of the Heinlein family from which Robert Heinlein descended was Matheis (Matthias) Heinlein (1710?–1765 ?), who arrived in Philadelphia on October 31, 1754, in the Bannister, out of Holland, with his wife, Margaret (born Anna Margrethe Heisler), his oldest son, twelve-year-old George (in some early records “Jerich”), and two daughters, Eva and Sarah. In the mid-eighteenth century, Philadelphia was the principal port of entry to America, because of the city’s reputation for religious tolerance and the presence of an abundance of good land west of the city (which then ended around Eighth Street).3 The family moved to Durham Township, Bucks County, and settled on a tract of partly farmed land on the southern slope of Bucher Hill—then frontier territory. One of the daughters, Sarah, married James Morgan, Daniel Boone’s uncle. The records of Berks County have Matthias Heinlein, a master hatter, living and working in Reading, Pennsylvania, then a center of hat manufacturing. He lived on one of the lots laid out by the Penns when they came up the river out of Philadelphia to establish a town. They must have been well thought of as neighbors in this frontier area: in 1797 Margaret Heinlein sponsored the baptism of a neighbor’s (Ludwig Gobel’s) daughter, her namesake: Anna Margrethe Gobel. She would have been quite aged at the time.
George Heinlein (1742–1805) appears in the Durham Township records of Bucks County in 1772, where he was listed as renting land from the Durham Furnace Company, from whom he purchased land in 1776. He worked as a potter and farmer—and he served as captain of the Durham Township militia throughout the Revolutionary War, thereby starting the military tradition of the Heinlein family in America. After the war, George moved into what is now Monroe County, and when his father died, he moved again, into Washington County, Pennsylvania. At his death in 1805, he was buried on the family plantation. The burial ground, which may also have contained the graves of other members of his immediate family, has since been ploughed under.
The name Lawrence enters the family in the third American generation: George’s son Lorenz (1770?–1867), probably born in Reading (Bucks County). He must have been the War of 1812 Heinlein—though he also lived through the Civil War in his remarkable ninety-seven-year lifespan.4 He married a woman named Anna, but nothing further is known of her. Of Lorenz, Robert related a family anecdote:
My great-great-great grandfather Lawrence Heinlein died prematurely at the age of ninety-seven through having carelessly left his cabin one winter morning without his gun—and found a buck deer on the ice of his pond. Lack of his gun did not stop my triple-great grandfather; this skinful of meat must not be allowed to escape. He went out on the ice and bulldogged the buck, quite successfully.
But in throwing the deer my ancestor slipped on the ice, went down, and a point of the deer’s rack stabbed between his ribs and pierced his heart.
No doubt it taught him a lesson—it certainly taught me one.5
Lorenz’s name also appears in some public documents in the anglicized form, “Lawrence.” A land grant is recorded for this Lawrence Heinlein in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, in 1800, and Lawrence, his father, George, and a James Heinlein are shown on the tax rolls of Northampton in 1799. For reasons unknown, James Heinlein changed the spelling of his name to “Hineline.”
Lawrence’s will, written in May of 1832, in Washington County, Pennsylvania, mentions Acy, Edward, Thomas, Rebeccah, Harriet, and Peggy Maria. Another daughter, Eleanora (b. 07/09/ 1766), had died in 1806. She had been baptized in the Trinity Lutheran Church in Reading, Pennsylvania, though Lawrence’s birth is not noted in the parish records anywhere in Bucks County. Another daughter, Sarah, was also not mentioned in the will. She had married Charrick Vandermark and died in 181
5.
Lorenz Heinlein’s son Asa (1795–1869) was born in Pennsylvania. The 1860 census lists his year of birth as 1794, and another source says “about 1802.” He married Hannah (or “Susannah”) Culver (born in New Jersey, where there is another clutch of unrelated Heinleins) in either 1797 or 1805 and moved his large family (seven children) westward into Guernsey County, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, with three of his brothers and their children. There is some inconsistency among the records as to when this move took place, but Asa’s oldest son, Lawrence (1828–1901), was born in Guernsey County, Ohio, in April 1828. Both Asa and son Lawrence may have fought in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1849, though there is no surviving documentation to support this speculation. Lawrence would have been eighteen years old when the war started in California; his father, Asa, would have been in his early to mid-forties. A second marriage is recorded for Asa, to Susannah Maria Culver Rose, a much younger woman.
The family thrived in eastern Ohio, “plenishing the land,” as Robert Heinlein once wrote,6 and slowly spreading out into the surrounding areas. By the end of the nineteenth century, this branch of the family had reached and settled in Blue Mound, Illinois, where a family Bible on the farm of F. M. Heinlein, one of Lawrence’s sons (and great-uncle of Robert), listed the birth and death dates for many members of the family.
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century Page 61