Of all the writers perhaps best known for their science fiction writing, the most thoroughly autobiographied has been Isaac Asimov. There the anecdotes that introduced nearly all his 399 monthly columns, most about science or mathematics, for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) (and perhaps a few in his similar work for Venture Science Fiction, Astounding Science Fiction/Analog, Science Digest and his editorials for Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine/Asimov's Science Fiction, among many others), and a slew of interviews throughout his life, he provided running autobiographical commentary in his collection The Early Asimov, the anthology Before the Golden Age, and much of the other relatively casual writing he contributed to such projects as The Hugo Winners volumes he introduced and wrote individual story introductions for. And there are the one essay and three volumes of explicit autobiography he wrote in his latter decades, as well as his collected letters (edited by his brother, Newsday editor Stanley Asimov), three retrospective collections of the range of his published work (one each to commemorate his 10oth, 200th and 300th published book, with the first volume of his autobiography Officially tied for 200th) and a final (so far) volume devoted to excerpts from his autobiographical writing with additional reminiscence by his widow, Janet Jeppson/Asimov. 
His earliest example of formal autobiography I'll deal with here is the essay he wrote for the Isaac Asimov issue of F&SF, the third in their irregular series devoting a portion of an issue to celebration of one or another major writer in the field who also has contributed notably to the magazine itself (the first two were devoted to Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury; since the Asimov, writers have ranged from Fritz Leiber through Kate Wilhelm to, most recently, David Gerrold, who might be the least F&SF-heavy of the honorees so far). Asimov's essay for that issue was "Portrait of the Writer as a Boy", and it served as a template for the Early Asimov and Before the Golden Age reminiscences cited above, as well as the seeds of the eventual book-length works. Like most of his F&SF essays, it was collected in a series of volumes for Doubleday, this one Science, Numbers and
I (1968); my father picked up the 1969 Ace paperback reprint, and it was the first bit of science-fiction writer autobiography I remember reading. Asimov was soon being nudged, if not too hard, into considering writing a full-length autobiography; he reports that his usual response to such a suggestion is that his life had been exceedingly dull; he wrote. He had other jobs, most of them academic aside from his World War 2 work as a civilian and soldier, but otherwise he wrote. And it's true that relatively little of his life was devoted to much else beside his compulsion to write, and his desire to explain, and to have a reasonably good time when not writing or doing such similar activities as giving lectures or talks to audiences, and socializing in various circumstances, both among lifelong friends and acquaintances in sf/fantasy fandom, fellow writers, his academic and scientific peers, and the eventual wider circle of people who knew him to one degree or another, due to his work with the American Humanist Society or simply through the publicity attendant on his productivity and sustained popularity as a writer.
For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
 |
| Lester Del Rey (or Leonard Knapp), Evelyn Del Rey. Frederik Pohl, Carol Metcalf Ulf Pohl |
