Heinlein coined grok, waldo, and speculative fiction
Robert A. Heinlein (7 July 1907 – 8 May 1988), often dubbed dean of science-fiction writers, pioneered hard SF and mainstream magazine sales. Four novels won Hugos; he minted words like grok and waldo, popularized TANSTAAFL and space marine, and with Asimov and Clarke formed the genre’s English-language “Big Three.”
Third of seven children in Butler, Missouri, raised in Kansas City’s “Bible Belt,” he watched Halley’s Comet return in 1910 and never lost the astronomy bug. Family tradition claimed Heinleins fought every American war since Independence. At sixteen he lied into the Missouri National Guard; Senator James A. Reed helped him into Annapolis despite a brother already there—Reed later said half of one hundred academy recommendation letters were for Robert. He graduated in 1929 fifth academically but twentieth of 243 after demerits, served on carrier Lexington under future fleet commander Ernest J. King, then destroyer Roper, before tuberculosis forced a 1934 discharge. Bedridden, he sketched a waterbed design he would later fictionalize.
A young progressive who worked Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign and nearly won a 1938 California Assembly primary (losing by under five hundred of ten thousand votes), he turned to fiction to pay the mortgage. “Life-Line” sold to Astounding in August 1939 for more than a contest’s first prize. During World War II he recruited Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp to the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Third wife Virginia “Ginny” Gerstenfeld—chemist, rocket test engineer, higher naval rank than his—married him in Raton, New Mexico, on 21 October 1948 and became first reader of manuscripts; Asimov tied Heinlein’s later rightward tilt to that marriage.
Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress still provoke debates over militarism, plural marriage, and competent yet traditionally feminine heroines such as Friday. Named first SFWA Grand Master in 1974, he also collected seven Retro Hugos fifty years after early publications. His plots pushed liberty, sex, religion, and nonconformity into futures shaped by engineering competence.
Source: Robert A. Heinlein
