"Robert A. Heinlein - Grumbles from the grave (Non Fiction)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

was about to end, Captain King asked that he be retained as a gunnery
specialist. However, Robert was given duty as gunnery officer on the Roper,
a destroyer.
Destroyer duty was difficult because of the rolling of the ship, and
seasickness was a way of life for him. He lost weight and came down with
tuberculosis. After he was cured, the Navy retired him from active duty.
At twenty-seven years of age, he found himself permanently ashore, with a
small pension. It was necessary for him to find some way to augment that
money. He tried silver mining, politics, selling real estate, and further study in
engineering. One day, he found an ad in a science fiction magazine for a
contest. So he sat down and wrote a story (“Life-Line”). He felt it was too
good for the magazine he had written it for, so he sent it to the top magazine
in the field—Astounding Science Fiction. John W. Campbell, Jr. bought the
story,
The next several stories he wrote were less salable, and it was only on his
fifth or sixth try that Campbell again purchased one. The second and
following stories eventually sold, but Robert was hooked for life on writing.
Originally, his purpose in writing was to pay off a mortgage on a house which
he and his wife of a few years had purchased. After that mortgage was paid
off, he found that when he tried to give up writing, he felt vaguely
uncomfortable, and it was only when he returned to his typewriter that he felt
fulfilled.


4
During World War II, Robert left his writing to do engineering work for the
U.S. Navy. For three years he did such work in Philadelphia. The war over,
he returned to his writing. By this time, he was looking for wider horizons. He
was persuaded to begin the juvenile line, and he sold stories to the Saturday
Evening Post. His second juvenile was picked up by television, in a series
that ran for five years. He also wrote the classic film, Destination Moon, and
he began to think about writing serious adult novels to open up that market to
science fiction.
Robert thought that the possibilities of mankind going into space were
sufficiently important and feasible that before he left Philadelphia, he wrote
two letters urging
that the Navy begin space exploration. One letter went through channels as
far as the head of the Philadelphia Naval Air Experimental Station, who killed
the proposal. The second went (also through channels), via a friend, through
Naval Operations, and got as far as a Cabinet meeting. It was reported that
then-President Truman took it seriously enough to ask whether such a rocket
could be launched from the deck of a ship. No, the President was told. And
that killed the project. In 1947 Robert was divorced from his wife, and when
he received his decree nisi, he married me. During World War II, I had gone
into the Navy, as a WAVE, and my second tour of duty was in Philadelphia,
where I met Robert; we worked in the same section.
One day Robert spent hours searching for some tear sheets for an
anthology. In an effort to help, I decided that his files needed to be organized.
So I set about that, setting up a system which I still use today. This began my
involvement in the literary business.