Robert A. Heinlein

Born July 7, 1907, trained as an engineer and naval officer before tuberculosis ended that career and pushed him toward writing. In the late 1940s he cracked The Saturday Evening Post and other mainstream outlets, unusual for a science fiction writer at the time. Over decades he built novels—Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress—that used space travel and alien worlds to probe plural marriage, militarism, individual liberty, the weight of religion on government, the shape of sexual relationships in a technically competent society. Early a progressive liber…