…and to receive the Grok buttons. Might be news release to give additional stimulus to book.
April 15, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
More about Stranger —
My brother Rex queried the shopkeeper from whom he had purchased several sorts of Stranger buttons, was told: “There are about a dozen different suppliers.” He went on to say that one of them was a girl who was working her way through college making these buttons (no doubt other sorts than Stranger buttons).
This afternoon (now Sunday evening) a sculptor, — of Los Gatos, called on us-to. show us a figure he had just completed in bronze of the death of the Martian named Smith. He asked permission to bring it over at once as he was taking it to his agent in San Francisco in negotiating a commission for an heroic-size crucifixion job for a church. ( — is a successful sculptor, not a starving artist.) But [he] wanted me to see it first.
A young woman who came with him asked me where I had gotten the word grok — no, she had not read the book, had not been able to lay hands on a copy [my emphasis added]…but that she knew what it meant as “everybody uses it now.”
January 26, 1967: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein Checking on Grok magazine.
February 28, 1967: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein
In the 2/19 issue of the New York Times Book Review, there is an article you may want to see — “Where the Action Is.” It mention(s) Stranger and Grok. Reference seems responsible for stirring Hollywood interest. Another call asking if Stranger rights available.
March 14, 1967: Lurton Blassingame to Robert A. Heinlein Have two issues of Grok.
April 28, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I enclose a clipping sent to me from Toronto-please return for my Stranger file. “Fair Use” of course-but that book must have made a wide impression if a telephone company in Canada makes this use of a neologism from it. (And when I think how Putnam continues to refuse to reissue a hardcover of it, I get so annoyed I need a Miltown. Damn it, they should at least arrange a Grosset and Dunlap reprint; I get regular inquiries about where to buy it in hardcover. He’s missing a lot of library sales, too.)
May 23, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
Since I sent you that Canadian telephone ad I have run into three more uses of grok-one in a short story in Playboy, simply as a part of dialog with no explanation, same for a poem, and a report of a shop in Florida: “We Grok Bookshop.” Oh, well, while it doesn’t pay royalties, it does interest me to see this neologism spread. But the darnedest thing so far is an announcement in the UCLA Daily Bruin concerning “Experimental College Classes-Spring 1968” with one course billed as “J. D. Salinger, Robt. Heinlein, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Other Personal Gurus — “!!! And I’m such a square I don’t even know who the third guru is. Nor does Ginny. However, I’m new to the guru business.
January 23, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
Did I tell you that [Dr.] Jack Williamson is using Stranger as a study text in his class in SF at U of E. New Mexico? Quote: “I’m launching new courses in linguistics and modern grammar and another in the factual literature of science…(in my SF class) and we are now reading Stranger in a Strange Land. I was a little afraid lhat some of my students might not be sufficiently sophisticated for it, but the response so far is good-some class members feel that it is more successful than Huxley’s Brave New World, which we have just finished.”
Did I mention in some other letter that Stanford now offers a course in SF? Apparently SF is beginning to be accepted as a respectable genre of serious literature. It is u pleasant feeling-but I have to keep reminding myself that seeing my name in print is nothing; it is seeing it on a check that counts. It is still the clown business; the object is to entertain the cash customer-I shall simply have to try harder than ever.