Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) is generally considered the greatest American SF writer of the 20th century. A famous and bestselling author in later life, he started as a navy man and graduate of Annapolis who was forced to retire because of tuberculosis. A socialist politician in the 1930s, he became one of the sources of Libertarian politics in the USA in his later years. His most famous works include the Future History series (stories and novels collected in The Past Through Tomorrow and continued in later novels), Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Given his desire for privacy in the later decades of his life, he was both stranger and more interesting than one could ever have known. This is the first of two volumes of a major American biography. This volume is about Robert A. Heinlein's life up to the end of the 1940s and the mid-life crisis that changed him forever.
Cabell Library DA685.R42 H6 2008
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The 20th century was a magazine century in many ways. Between 1900 and 2000, the number of magazines grew from about 3,000 to 17,815a 593 percent increase, which exceeded population growth by 95 percent. The typical American read less than half a magazine per month in 1920, but by 2000 that figure tripled to 1.35 magazines per month. This book examines how and why magazines grew so rapidly. Structured by decades and chronology, it tells the story of innovative publishers, editors, and magazines and how and why they succeeded. Sumner argues that the move from general-interest to niche audiences originated early in the century, not after the rise of television. Furthermore, he says that the growth of advertising enabled the cost of magazines to steadily decline. The declining price and expanding audiences brought a steady erosion in the intellectual content of magazines, which is illustrated by the rise in sex and celebrity titles during the 1970s and later. Sumner concludes with an assessment of the decade since 2000 and offers an optimistic outlook for the future of magazines.
In twenty-nine provocative essays, Joyce Carol Oates maps the "rough country" that is both the treacherous geographical and psychological terrain of the writers she so cogently analyzes--Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, E. L. Doctorow, and Margaret Atwood, among others--and the emotional terrain of Oates's own life following the unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith, after forty-eight years of marriage.
Along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs (1914--97) is an iconic figure of the Beat generation. In William S. Burroughs, Phil Baker investigates this cult writer's life and work--from small-town Kansas to New York in the '40s, Mexico and the South American jungle, to Tangier and the writing of Naked Lunch, to Paris and the Beat Hotel, and '60s London--alongside Burrough's self-portrayal as an explorer of inner space, reporting back from the frontiers of experience.
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