Item: You excuse the somewhat wild remarks of yourself, [Fletcher] Pratt, and company, on the basis that you are sore as hell, especially so as you are navy fans and love ships. (Incidentally, you don’t seem to want to be classed as part of the general public, yet seem to resent being advised to act like professionals in the matter.) If you think you’re sore and upset, how do you think I feel? Pearl Harbor isn’t a point on a floor game to me-I’ve been there. The old Okie isn’t a little wooden model six inches long; she’s a person to me. I’ve sketched her fuel lines down in her bilges. I was turret captain of her number two turret. I have been in her main battery fire control party when her big guns were talking. Damn it, man,
I’ve lived in her. And the casualty lists at Oahu are not names in a newspaper to me; they are my friends, my classmates. The thing hit me with such utter sickening grief as I have not experienced before in my life and has left me with a feeling of loss of personal honor such as I never expected to experience. For one reason and one only-because I found myself sitting on a hilltop, in civilian clothes, with no battle station and unable to fight, when it happened.
EDITOR ‘s NOTE: Robert wrote stories for John W. Campbell, Jr. for Astounding and Unknown for close to three years. When Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, Robert tried to persuade the Navy to take him back on active duty. Failing in that, he went to work in Philadelphia doing engineering at the Naval Air Experimental Station.
The war over, Robert looked around at the wider horizons for his writing career. Four short stories were sold to the Saturday Evening Post, then the most important and highest paying market, and he sold his first juvenile novel to Charles Scribner’s Sons. The next market he tackled was motion pictures, and the successful Destination Moon resulted.
“Gulf” was the only story Robert wrote after World War II which was intended solely for the Astounding market. Occasionally his agent, Lurton Blassingame, would send a novel to John W. Campbell, Jr. Some of those were rejected for various reasons with lengthy letters of explanation from John Campbell to Robert. Those stories were never intended for that market, but Campbell would explain why the writing and stories were terrible-from his viewpoint. When Podkayne [Podkayne of Mars] was offered to him, he wrote Robert, asking what he knew about raising young girls in a few thousand carefully chosen words.
The friendship dwindled, and was eventually completely gone. It was just another casualty, probably, of World War II.
CHAPTER III
*
THE SLICKS AND THE SCRIBNER’S JUVENILES
TRY AT SLICKS
October 25, 1946: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
The news that you sold “The Green Hills of Earth” to the Saturday Evening Post is very gratifying for more reasons than the size of the check. I am happy that we have cracked the top slick market; I am particularly happy that it was done with this story, as it is a favorite of mine which has been growing in my mind for five years.
EDITOR’S NOTE In the 1930s and 1940s and farther back, the Saturday Evening Post was the elite market of the short story writer. It paid the highest rates and carried the most prestige.
The Post was on every newsstand, and was widely read.
In addition to short stories, and serialized novels, it also ran many articles. To be well-informed, one read the Post. It was sold everywhere; the covers by Norman Rockwell were-especially featured. Each issue contained some articles, short fiction, and usually a series of stories concerning much the same cast, and it was the ambition of every short story writer to have one of these series going. Bonus rates were paid for such series.
Selling the Post was a boy’s job, and boys would go from door to door selling the Post, with two companion magazines, The Ladies Home Journal, and Country Gentleman. One of Robert’s first jobs as a child was being a P-J-G boy.