Article: Robert A. Heinlein: Naval Academy (ca. 1939)

Heinlein had been following the war news from Europe with increasing unease: the lights of democracy were going out all over Europe and Asia (to both fascism and communism, which Heinlein, regarded as equally evil). A year and a half earlier he had written a short-short for a fanzine that tried, unsuccessfully, to waken science fiction fans to the Nazi extermination camps. Now the U.S. was involved in the war, and he immediately applied for active duty, but was rejected for medical reasons — tuberculosis scars on his lungs and myopia (nearsightedness) “beyond the limits allowed even for the staff corps.” But a Navy buddy Albert Scoles was in charge of the Materials Laboratory at the Naval Air Experimental Station at Mustin Field, near Philadelphia. Scoles was the aviator friend Heinlein had “talked in” by radio in 1931 while both were serving on the Lexington. The Materials Lab had begun a steady expansion when war broke out in Europe in September 1939.¹

After high school, Heinlein attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. After graduating from the Academy in 1929, he served as an officer in the United States Navy until 1934, when he was discharged due to pulmonary tuberculosis. During his recovery he re-invented the waterbed. The military was the second great influence on Heinlein; throughout his life, he strongly believed in loyalty, leadership, and other military ideals. This attitude permeated his fiction, most prominently (and controversially) in the novel.²

In 1973 Heinlein taught as James V. Forrestal Lecturer at the U.S. Naval Academy. He was awarded the first Grand Master Nebula in 1975. Heinlein was repeatedly voted as ‘the best all-time author’ in reader’s polls held by the magazine Locus in 1973 and 1975. He died on May 8, 1988.³

At the Academy, Heinlein formed a close friendship with Caleb Laning, a fellow Twain enthusiast who in 1929 introduced him to James Branch Cabell’s banned-in-Boston JURGEN: A COMEDY OF JUSTICE. Cabell’s blend of irony, myth, delicately bent satire and screened-off low comedy appealed to Heinlein, and he returned to Cabell for inspiration periodically during his writing career. His satires owe much of their technical foundation to Cabell.^{1 5}

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