The Saturday Evening Post carried a column about the authors who appeared in each issue. The column was called "Keeping Posted, "and Robert was asked for material about himself and~a picture. Because it was his first appearance in the Post with "The Green Hills of Earth" he was included in that column.
...sending you on Monday another interplanetary short, intended for slick (the Post, I hope) -- the domestic troubles of a space pilot, titled either "For Men Must Work" or "Space Pilot" ["Space Jockey"]. It took me a week to write it and three weeks to cut it from 12,000 to 6,000 [words] -- but I am beginning to understand the improvement in style that comes from economy in words. (I set it at 6,000 because a careful count of the stories in recent issues of the Post shows that the shorts average a little over 6,000 and are rarely as short as 5,000.)
EDITOR'S NOTE Robert's ambition to write for higher paying and wider markets than pulp magazines caused him to look around for an agent who had good connections with other markets. For this purpose, he consulted L. Ron Hubbard, who introduced him to Lurton Blassingame.
Lurton had come to New York ambitious to write, but discovered that he could not make the grade. So he remained in the publishing center and became one of the most highly respected agents there. His brother, Wyatt Blassingame, sold regularly, if infrequently, to the Saturday Evening Post.
Robert became, eventually, Lurton's star client, but he was preoccupied with ' 'world saving" after the atomic bombs were dropped. The articles he wrote did not sell. He then began the juvenile series of books-with Scribner's-starting with Rocket Ship Galileo (working title: Young Atomic Engineers). For some years, he wrote one juvenile per year.
The two men met on one of our trips to New York, and Robert urged Lurton to come to visit us in Colorado. Robert would accompany Lurton on a hunting trip, for elk and antelope and other game. I was asked to join them on fishing trips.
Although Robert neither hunted nor fished, he went on such trips with Lurton. During their trip to Gunnison, Colorado, where they went after elk, Robert "kept camp" while Lurton halted through the mountains, along with a group of other hunters. Lurton bagged an enormous elk, and we were left with a freezer full of elk meat. It was my impression that Robert went along on such trips for Lurton's company.
Robert's next conquest, assisted by Lurton, was the Saturday Evening Post, with "The Green Hills of Earth, " followed by three other stories for that magazine.
The friendship flourished, despite Robert's distaste for doing business with friends. It lasted until Lurton in the Iate~l970s, thinking of retirement, took on some younger associates. Robert's books are still handled by the Blas-singame-Spectrum Agency in New York.
November 12, 1946: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
...and I shall get back to work, probably on a story called "It's Great to Be Back!" A couple living in Luna City are about to return to Earth, their contracts completed after three years. They have been homesick the whole time and are always talking about it. They return to Earth and discover that they had forgotten the disadvantages of living on Earth-uncontrolled weather, dirt, colds-in-the-head, provincial attitudes, stupid and ignorant people (the residents of Luna City are of course exceptionally intelligent and civilized because of selection for those qualities-only persons of high IQs and social compatibility would pay the cost of sending them to the Moon and keeping them there), etc., etc. At the end of the story they are more homesick than ever-for Luna City! -- and are straining a gut to get back there. The story will be used also to give a picture of Luna City and the conditions of life on the Moon, social and economic, for background and color.
EDITOR 's NOTE: Between 1947 and 1949, at least ten of Robert A. Heinlein's ' 'slicks" were published; four appeared in the Post and two in Argosy. This was a remarkable achievement, but it was soon eclipsed by the success of his juvenile novels.
ROCKET SHIP GALILEO
February 19, 1946: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I am going to write the juvenile outlined in my last [letter], starting two days hence. You will receive takes and a synopsis, and the finished manuscript should be in your hands about 15 March. [Two friends] convinced me that my own propaganda purposes will be served best by writing a series of boys' books in addition to the adult items previously described. I have purchased several of the popular boys' series novels and feel confident that I can produce salable copy-copy which can be sold to one of these markets: Westminster, Grosset and Dunlap, Crown, or Random House.
March 16, 1946: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I think his [the editor who turned down Young Atomic Engineers] conception of a story of the atomic era is inappropriate. We have entered a period of extreme change. I see two major possibilities-either a disastrous atomic war which will destroy for a long time the present technological structure, followed by a renaissance, the nature of which I am unable to predict, or a period of peace in which technical progress will be so enormously accelerated that only short range predictions j can hope to be reasonably accurate. Young Atomic Engineers \ [Rocket Ship Galileo] is based on the latter of the two assumptions, i.e., a period of peace and unchecked technical progress.
In doing fiction about the future, I regard myself as a professional prophet-a man who makes an honest attempt to evaluate the probabilities and to write stories setting forth patterns inherent in those probabilities. If I am to be honest, I must prophesy what / think will (or could) happen, not what someone else thinks will happen. If Mr. -- does not see my concept of the possibilities, he had better write it himself or get a hack writer who is willing to write another man's plot. That should be easy for him to do and I do not disapprove of such hack work-but it is almost impossible for me to do it, and I won't do it unless I'm hungry, which I'm not.
(Young Atomic Engineers contains two conventional deviations from what I believe to be reasonably possible; I have condensed the preparation time for the trip and I have assumed that four people can do work which should require more nearly forty. Otherwise, I regard the techniques used in the story, and even the incidents, to be possible, albeit romantic and in some respects not too likely in detail. But I do expect space travel and I expect it soon. The counterplot is more than a possibility, it is a distinct menace-though it may not turn out to hinge on a base located on the Moon.)
...I suppose you are used to the method of having a writer send in a few chapters and a synopsis. I will do that when requested to, but, unfortunately, once I have gone that far with a novel, that novel will be finished about ten days later, or at least with such speed that only the fastest possible response from the publisher can affect the outcome very much. I am sorry, but it is a concomitant of how I work. I work slowly on a novel for the first few chapters only. As soon as I can hear the characters talk, it then becomes a race to see whether I put down their actions fast enough not to miss any of them. It is more economical in time and money and it results in a better story for me to work straight through to a conclusion, rather than wait for an editor to make up his mind whether or not he likes it. Editors are not likely to like my advance synopses in any case, for it is simply impossible for me to give the flavor of a story not yet written in a synopsis.
[(The additional books proposed for this series are: The Young Atomic Engineers on Mars, or Secret of the Moon Corridors
The Young Atomic Engineers in the Asteroids, or The Mystery of the Broken Planet
The Young Atomic Engineers in Business, or The Solar System Mining Corporation