After a brief spell in the US navy from which he was forced to resign due to ill health in 1934 he went to UCLA to study physics. He took a number of jobs before getting his first story published in 1939 in the magazine Amazing Science Fiction, a publication that he would become intimately associated with. His ability to shape the path of ASF and SF in general between the 40s and 60s was largely due to the fact that he was a mature man when he started publishing - 32, rather than a relatively inexperienced teenager like Isaac Asimov who was 19 when his first story was published in the same year.
Heinlein is the acknowledged Father of the genre and recognised as one of the three Grand Masters of the genre along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke.
He has written many stories in both short story and novel form. Many of the later novels are part of his 'Future History' story arc which tell the history of human expansion through space especially as it affects the Howard Families - a small group of people who were originally selected as an experiment in breeding a particularly long lived sub species of humanity.
And for more books by Robert Heinlein click here!
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