|
Biografie Isaac Asimov
Biographical (non-literary)
How do you pronounce \"Isaac Asimov\"?
\"EYE\'zik AA\'zi-mov\". The name is spelled with an \"s\" and not a \"z\" because Asimov\'s father didn\'t understand the English alphabet clearly when the family moved to the U.S. in 1923. (In Russian, the spelling was the Cyrillic equivalent of Azimov, and in Yiddish, the Hebrew letters were aleph-zayin-yod-mem-aleph-vav-vav.) One way to remember this pronunciation is the pun from The Flying Sorcerers by Larry Niven and David Gerrold: \"As a color, shade of purple-grey\", or \"As a mauve\". Asimov wrote a poem (\"The Prime of Life\") in which he rhymes his surname with \"stars above\"; someone else suggested amending the poem to rhyme it with \"mazel tov\", which he thought an improvement.
Asimov\'s own suggestion, however, as to how to remember his name was to say \"Has Him Off\" and leave out the H\'s.
When did Asimov die? What was the cause of his death? Where is he buried?
Asimov died on April 6, 1992 of heart and kidney failure, which were complications of the HIV infection he contracted from a transfusion of tainted blood during his December 1983 triple-bypass operation. (The revelation that AIDS was the cause of his death was not made until It\'s Been a Good Life was published in 2002). His body was cremated and his ashes were not interred.
When and where was he born?
Asimov was born (officially) January 2, 1920, in the town of Petrovichi (pronounced peh-TRUV-ih-chee), then in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (czarist Russia no longer existed, while the USSR hadn\'t formed yet) and now in Russia. It can be found at latitude 53.58 N, longitude 32.10 E, about 400 km. southwest of Moscow and some 16 km east of the border between Belarus and Russia. Born to Jews in the early days of the RSFSR, there are no accurate records, however, and it is possible that he may have been born as early as October 4, 1919.
Asimov\'s birthdate was temporarily changed by his mother to September 7, 1919 in order to get him into school a year earlier. When, several years later, he discovered this, he insisted that the official records be changed back. January 2, 1920 was the date he personally celebrated throughout his life.
His family left the Soviet Union on January 11, 1923 and arrived in New York City February 3.
Please note that the date given on the first page of Asimov\'s third autobiographical book, I. Asimov: A Memoir, is a typographical error (January 1, 1920). Asimov\'s other books leave no possible doubt that the date he celebrated as his birthday was January 2.
Who are the other members of his family?
He was the son of Judah Asimov (1896-1969) and Anna Rachel Berman Asimov (1895-1973), who were married in 1918. Asimov was named Isaac after his mother\'s father, Isaac Berman. He has a sister Marcia (born Manya in 1922) and a brother Stanley (1929-1995).
His father saved the money earned from several jobs during his first three years in the U.S. and bought a candy store in Brooklyn, which his parents ran for the next forty or so years.
Marcia married Nicholas Repanes in 1955 and has two sons, Larry and Richard.
Stan became a journalist and rose to vice president in charge of editorial administration for Newsday. Stan died of leukemia on August 16, 1995. He and his wife Ruth were the parents of Eric and Nanette, both journalists, and Daniel, a mathematician. Dan Asimov may be found on the net, but does not wish to be bothered with inquiries about Isaac, so please leave him alone.
Was he married? Did he have any children?
Asimov met Gertrude Blugerman on a blind date on Valentine\'s Day, 1942, and they were married five and a half months later, July 26, 1942. They had a son David (b. 1951) and a daughter Robyn Joan (b. 1955). They separated in 1970 and their divorce became effective on November 16, 1973.
Isaac first met Janet Opal Jeppson when he signed an autograph for her at an SF convention on September 2, 1956. He was suffering badly (and silently) from a kidney stone at the time, which gave her the impression that he was an unpleasant person. He later claimed to have absolutely no recollection of that first meeting. They next met on May 1, 1959, when Janet attended a mystery writers\' banquet as a guest of Veronica Parker Johnson and was seated with Isaac. That time the mutual attraction was immediate. When Isaac and Gertrude finally separated in 1970, he moved in with Janet almost at once, and they were married at Janet\'s home by an official of the Ethical Culture Society on November 30, 1973. Asimov had no children by his second marriage.
Where did Asimov live, attend school, and work during his life?
When the Asimov family came to the United States in 1923, they moved into their first apartment at 425 Van Siclen Avenue, in the East New York section of Brooklyn. In the summer of 1925 they moved one block away to an apartment at 434 Miller Avenue. They moved half a mile eastward in December 1928 to another apartment at 651 Essex Street, above the second candy store bought by his father. In early 1933, they moved to an apartment on Church Avenue, and after a brief stay there they moved to an apartment above yet another family candy store, at 1312 Decatur Street, in the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn. In December of 1936, Asimov\'s father sold his third candy store and bought his fourth, at 174 Windsor Place, in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, and the family moved to a house across the street.
In May of 1942, Asimov left New York to work at a wartime job at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, and there he rented a room in someone else\'s house at 4707 Sansom Street, until September, when soon after getting married he and Gertrude moved into an apartment at 4715 Walnut Street. When the lease ran out they moved to another apartment in Philadelphia at Wingate Hall in December. They moved back to New York in September 1945, and in November he was inducted into the army. In the army he spent a week at Fort Meade, Md., and was then stationed at Camp Lee, Virginia until March of 1946, when he was transferred to the island of Oahu. He returned to the states in May, and after his discharge from the army in July, he and Gertrude moved into a small apartment in Brooklyn on 213 Dean Street in September 1946. In September of 1947 they moved to the downstairs apartment of his parents\' house on Windsor Place, and in July of the next year moved to Apartment 9-C of the Stuyvesant Town complex on 273 First Avenue. They moved to Boston in May 1949 to an apartment at 42 Worcester Square, and quickly moved again in July to an apartment in the suburb of Somerville. In May 1951 they moved to an apartment at 265 Lowell Street, in Waltham, Mass. They moved two miles to the south to a house at 45 Greenough Street in West Newton, Mass. in March 1956.
In July 1970, he separated from his wife and moved back to New York, staying at the Oliver Cromwell Hotel. After his divorce from Gertrude in November 1973, he married Janet and moved into her apartment. They moved to the Park Ten apartments in April 1975, to a 33rd floor apartment overlooking Central Park, where they lived together until his death in 1992.
Asimov began his formal education in the New York Public School system in 1925 at PS182, and transferred to PS202 when the family moved in 1928. He continued on to East New York Junior High School 149 in September 1930, where he was placed in the rapid advance course, and graduated in June 1932. He entered tenth grade at Boys High School in the fall, and graduated in the spring of 1935. After attending City College for only a few days, he switched to the Brooklyn campus of Seth Low Junior College, which provided him with a scholarship of one hundred dollars. The college closed after his freshman year, so he continued at the parent institution, Columbia University, at the Morningside Heights campus. He graduated from Columbia with a B.S. in Chemistry in 1939. After his applications to all five New York City medical schools were rejected, he applied for the master\'s program in chemistry at Columbia. After he was rejected for the master\'s program, he convinced the department committee to accept him on probation. After one year the probation was lifted, and he earned his M.A. in Chemistry in 1941. He continued on at Columbia in a Ph.D. program, and after the gap in his research that lasted from 1942 through 1946 (due to his wartime job and his army), he earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry in May 1948.
Asimov started working in his parents\' Essex Street candy store in 1929, when his mother became unable to work a full day due to her third pregnancy, and learned the steady work habits that would stay with him for the rest of his life. After his freshman year of college, he had a summer job at the Columbia Combining Company, where he cut and folded sheets of rubberized fabric. During his sophomore year he held a National Youth Administration job working for a psychology professor, and as a junior and senior his NYA job was as a typist for a sociology professor. Throughout the period of 1929 to 1942, he continued to work at the family candy store. He worked as a junior chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard from May 1942 to October 1945, together with fellow science fiction authors Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp. In 1948 he obtained a postdoctoral position at Columbia, researching antimalarial compounds. In June of 1949 he took a job as instructor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine, and was promoted to assistant professor in December 1951. He was promoted to associate professor, which provided him with tenure, in July 1955. He gave up his teaching duties and salary at the School of Medicine in 1958 , but retained his title, so that on July 1, 1958, he became a full-time writer. (He was fired, he said, for choosing to be an excellent lecturer and science writer, rather than be a merely mediocre researcher.) In 1979, the school promoted him to the rank of full professor.
What are the titles of Asimov\'s autobiographies? Where can I get them?
In Memory Yet Green covers the period from 1920-1954. In Joy Still Felt spans the time from 1954-1978. These two volumes were published by Doubleday in 1979 and 1980, with paperback editions following a year later. They are currently out of print, and thus your best bet for finding them is to check used book stores, science fiction conventions, etc.
I. Asimov: A Memoir was published by Doubleday in March 1994, and covers his entire life, written in 166 brief chapters arranged in roughly chronological order. Instead of writing only about the details of his life since 1978, at the request of his wife Janet he wrote a retrospective that provided insights into his thoughts, feelings, and way of thinking.
Yours, Isaac Asimov, a collection of excerpts from letters he had written over the years, edited by his brother Stan and published by Doubleday in October 1995, also provides a great insight into Asimov\'s personal and professional life.
It\'s Been a Good Life, a condensed version of his autobiographical volumes that also includes additional material, edited by Janet Jeppson Asimov and published by Prometheus Books in 2002. The additional material includes \"A Way of Thinking\", Asimov\'s 400th essay for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which Janet put together from conversations they had and letters they had exchanged during many years of correspondence. More excerpts from those letters, chosen to illustrate Isaac\'s philosophy of life, are sprinkled throughout the book. It also features an expanded version of the epilogue that appeared in Yours, Isaac Asimov, which provides additional commentary about Isaac\'s final illness.
In addition, the three Opus books (Opus 100, Opus 200, and Opus300), The Early Asimov, and Before the Golden Age contain substantial autobiographical material, and Asimov talks a great deal about himself and his life in many of his other books, particularly in anecdotes found in his essays in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and his editorials in Isaac Asimov\'s Science Fiction Magazine (which has since been renamed Asimov\'s Science Fiction).
What religious beliefs did Asimov have?
Asimov had no religious beliefs; he never believed in either God or an afterlife. He considered himself a Humanist, one who believes that it is humans who are responsible for all of the problems of society, as well as the great achievements throughout history. The Humanists believe that neither good nor evil are produced by supernatural beings, and that the solution to the problems of humankind can be found without the intervention of such beings. Asimov was a strong proponent of scientific reasoning who adamantly opposed creationists, religious zealots, pseudoscience, and mysticism.
Asimov did not oppose genuine religious feeling in others. He did, however, have little patience for intolerance or superstition masquerading as religion.
Although he was an atheist, Asimov was proud of his Jewish heritage. His parents never made an effort to teach him religion. He did study in Hebrew school for several months while his father served as secretary for the local synagogue, where he learned some Hebrew and how to read Yiddish.
Asimov did have a great interest in the Bible, and wrote several books about it, notably the two volume Asimov\'s Guide to the Bible and The Story of Ruth.
Did Asimov do anything other than write all day and all night?
Although famous for writing over eight hours a day, seven days a week, Asimov found time to do a few other things beside writing.
He was a member of the Dutch Treat Club, a group that met for lunch every Tuesday at the Regency Hotel in New York. He joined the club in 1971 and was made president in 1985.
He joined the Baker Street Irregulars in 1973, a group of avid Sherlock Holmes fans that held an annual banquet to celebrate Holmes\' birthday. Asimov admitted that he was not a true Holmes enthusiast, but enjoyed delivering banquet toasts, speeches, and singing sentimental songs.
Asimov was a Gilbert & Sullivan enthusiast since his youth, when he listened to the plays on the radio. In 1970 he joined the Gilbert and Sullivan Society, and attended almost all of their meetings. He regularly attended G & S productions in Manhattan, and occasionally served as toastmaster at benefit shows. He loved to sing songs from the shows, and was quite proud of his singing voice (among other things).
He was also a P. G. Wodehouse fan, and a member of The Wodehouse Society. He acknowledged that the character of Henry, the waiter who played a central role in his Black Widower stories, was based on Wodehouse\'s Jeeves the butler. He also paid tribute to the influence of Wodehouse in his Azazel short stories. He belonged to an all-male club called the Trap Door Spiders, which met for dinner one Friday night every month, treating a guest invited by the host to dinner in return for the privilege of grilling him about his life and work. The club formed the basis for the Black Widower mystery short stories. The characters were loosely modeled on actual club members as follows:
Black Widower Trap Door Spider
============= ================
Geoffrey Avalon L. Sprague de Camp
Emmanuel Rubin Lester del Rey
James Drake Doc Clark
Thomas Trumball Gilbert Cant
Mario Gonzalo Lin Carter
Roger Halsted Don Bensen
Henry fictional
Asimov joined Mensa, the high-IQ society, in the early 1960s, but found that many of the members were arrogant about their supposed intelligence, so he let his membership lapse. However when he moved back to New York, he became an active member once again, and gave speeches to groups of Mensans on a number of occasions. Yet once again membership became a burden for him, so he resigned from the group.
Asimov was a member of the Explorers Club, and served as master of ceremonies for two years at their annual banquet.
Is it true that Asimov had a fear of flying?
Yes, the same author who described spaceflights to other worlds and who argued valiantly for the cause of rationality suffered from an irrational fear of heights and flying. This had the consequence of limiting the range over which he travelled throughout much of his life.
Asimov discovered that he was acrophobic at the New York World\'s Fair in 1940, when he took his date and first love Irene on a roller coaster, expecting that it would cause her to cling to him in fear and give him a chance to kiss her. Instead it was he who was terrified while his date remained perfectly calm. Two years later, his wife-to-be Gertrude convinced him to ride on a roller coaster at Coney Island, and he was once again terrified.
Asimov did in fact fly on an airplane twice in his life. The first time he did so while working at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia during World War II. While working on dye markers that made ditched pilots more visible to rescue searchers, he developed a test to compare dye visibility that did not require a plane flight, but in order to validate his test he volunteered to fly in a small plane to observe the markers. He was so absorbed in his observations that he didn\'t suffer from any undue fear. His second plane flight took place on his return from his army station in Hawaii, in which he flew aboard a DC-3 to San Francisco.
After his military service in Hawaii in 1946, Asimov never ventured so far from home, and did not often travel great distances. When he did need to travel significant distances, he usually took a train, or rode in someone else\'s car, until he learned to drive in 1950. Oddly enough, he found that he felt quite comfortable behind the wheel of an automobile. In the 1970s he and Janet travelled by train to Florida and California, and they took several several sea cruises to such places as the Caribbean, West Africa, England, and France.
What other notable quirks, fears, and pet peeves did Asimov have?
Asimov was a teetotaler in later life, mainly because in all of his experiences with drinking alcoholic beverages, just one or two drinks were sufficient to get him drunk. On the day he passed the oral examination for his Ph.D., he drank five Manhattans in celebration, and his friends had to carry him back to school and try to sober him up. His wife told him that he spent that entire night in bed giggling every once in a while and saying \"Doctor Asimov\".
He was completely inept at any athletic activity that required any coordination; he never learned how to swim or ride a bicycle. Spending even ten minutes in the summer sun turned his skin a bright red. In the army he had the worst score in his company on the physical-conditioning test (though he had the highest score on the intelligence test). He was afraid of needles and the sight of blood.
Asimov discovered that he was claustrophiliac, meaning that he was fond of enclosed places. He was quite comfortable in small rooms with no windows, and always insisted on using artificial lighting when he worked. He considered the underground cities on Earth in The Caves of Steel as the ultimate windowless enclosures.
He did not allow anyone to call him by any nicknames, except for a few old friends who had been calling him Ike for years.
Asimov hated it when his name was misspelled in print or mispronounced by others. His desire to have his name spelled correctly even resulted in a 1957 short story, \"Spell my Name with an \'s\'\".
(Notable instances of his name being misspelled occurred on the cover of the November 1952 issue of Galaxy, which contained \"The Martian Way\", and on his 1976 Nebula Award for \"The Bicentennial Man\".)
When in 1939 he wrote a letter to Planet Stories, which printed it and spelled his name \"Isaac Asenion\", he quickly fired off an angry letter to them. (His friend Lester Del Rey took great delight in referring to him as \"Asenion\" for many years afterward. On the other hand, Asimov himself referred to positronic robots with the Three Laws as \"Asenion\" robots in The Caves of Steel.)
Asimov was quite perturbed when Johnny Carson, host of the Tonight Show, pronounced his first name as I-ZAK, with equal emphasis on both syllables, during an appearance on the television show in New York in 1968.
Biographical (literary)
When did he start writing?
When he was eleven years old he began writing The Greenville Chums at College, which he planned to be the first book in a series. After writing only eight chapters about the adventures of boys living in a small town, he gave up after recognizing the fact that he didn\'t know what he was talking about. However he made a very important discovery in the process. After he wrote the first two chapters, he told the story he had written so far to a friend at school during lunchtime. When he stopped, his friend demanded that he continue. When Asimov explained that he had told him all that he had so far, the friend asked to borrow the book when he was finished reading it. Asimov was astonished to discover that his friend thought that he was retelling a story that he read. The implied compliment impressed him so much that, from that day on, Asimov took himself seriously as a writer.
Asimov\'s first published writing was a column he did for his high school newspaper. His first accepted piece was a humorous essay entitled \"Little Brothers\", which appeared in The Boys High Recorder, his high school\'s semi-annual literary publication, in 1934, and is reprinted in Before the Golden Age. He wrote it in a creative writing class he took that year; a class which almost convinced him to give up writing.
What was his first published story?
After John Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, rejected his short stories \"Cosmic Corkscrew\", \"Stowaway\" and \"This Irrational Planet\" in June, July, and September of 1938, \"Marooned Off Vesta\" was accepted for publication by Amazing Stories in October and was published in the March 1939 edition on January 10, 1939.
What awards did he win for his writing?
Asimov was presented a special Hugo award in 1963 for \"adding science to science fiction\" for his essays in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
The Foundation Series was awarded the Best All-time Novel Series Hugo Award in 1966.
The Gods Themselves won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for best novel in 1973.
\"The Bicentennial Man\" was awarded the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for best novelette in 1977.
Foundation\'s Edge was presented with the Hugo for best novel in 1983.
In 1987, he was awarded the special lifetime Nebula Grandmaster award.
\"Gold\" was presented with the Hugo for best novelette in 1992.
I. Asimov: A Memoir won the Hugo Award for best nonfiction in 1995.
\"The Mule\", the seventh Foundation story published in Astounding Science Fiction (which appeared in book form as part two of Foundation and Empire), was awarded a 1946 Retro-Hugo for Best Novel of 1945 at the 1996 WorldCon.
He was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1997.
He won the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation Award in 1957 for his book Building Blocks of the Universe.
He was awarded the Howard W. Blakeslee Award from the American Heart Association in 1960 for his book The Living River.
He received the James T. Grady Award of the American Chemical Society in 1965.
He was presented with the Westinghouse Science Writing Award in 1967.
He was awarded fourteen honorary doctorate degrees from various universities.
What is Asimov\'s last book?
Asimov\'s publishers have on more than one occasion published the Good Doctor\'s \"last\" book as a marketing ploy. The six titles most often so-described are:
Asimov Laughs Again (the last book he saw published before his death, published in 1992)
Forward the Foundation (his last Foundation novel, published in 1993)
Frontiers II (his last -- to date -- essay collection, published in 1993)
I. Asimov: A Memoir (his last autobiographical volume, published in 1994)
Gold (his last -- to date -- anthology of science fiction stories, published in 1995)
Magic (his last -- to date -- anthology of fantasy stories, published in 1996)
All this, however, does not preclude the possibility of more books by Asimov being published in the future. There are, for example, enough uncollected F&SF science essays for one more collection, and probably enough uncollected Black Widower stories. Additional volumes could be published in the \"Complete Stories\" series, as well as other anthologies (e.g., \"The Honest-to-goodness Complete Robot Stories Book\").
All we can say for certain is that with his death, Asimov appears to have stopped writing. He has, by no means, stopped publishing. It is therefore probably meaningless to refer to Asimov\'s \"last\" book in absolute chronological terms.
Of his own work, what were Asimov\'s favorite and least favorite novels? What were his favorite and least favorite stories?
Asimov\'s favorite novel was The Gods Themselves, largely because of the middle section, which was both absolutely brilliant and included non-humans and sex. (Asimov had often been accused of being unable to write stories with non-humans or sex and therefore leaving them out of his work.)
His least favorite novel was The Stars Like Dust. It was scheduled for serialization in Galaxy, then edited by Horace Gold. Gold absolutely insisted on including a subplot about the characters ransacking the Galaxy for an ancient document which would utterly revolutionize their political order. In the end, it turns out that the document is \"gur Pbafgvghgvba bs gur Havgrq Fgngrf\" (rot-13 coding added as spoiler protection, as if this sub-par novel could be truly \"spoiled\" by giving away plot points).
Asimov loathed the subplot and bitterly resented being forced to add it. He offered to his editor at Doubleday, Walter Bradbury, to remove it for the hardcover publication, but Bradbury liked the subplot and insisted it be left in.
Then to add insult to injury, when the first paperback edition was published by Ace, they changed the title (for the worse) and totally gutted the novel, to the point that Asimov could hardly recognize it.
Asimov\'s three favorite stories were (in order): \"The Last Question\", \"The Bicentennial Man\", and \"The Ugly Little Boy\" (all found in The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov, among other places).
Among his least favorite stories were:
\"Black Friar of the Flame\" (found in The Early Asimov). The story was his first attempt at a \"future historical\" and was bounced around from editor to editor until it was finally published. It was revised a half-a-dozen times and rejected ten times in a two-year-period. Asimov was so bitter over the story\'s history that he swore never again to revise anything more than twice, and he would even fight over having to do a second revision.
(This is his least favorite story among those that most Asimov fans are likely to have ever read. He also implies in The Early Asimov that it is his least favorite story of all time, but this is clarified in In Joy Still Felt.)
His all-time least favorite story was \"The Portable Star\" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Winter 1955). As with \"A Woman\'s Heart,\" Asimov never authorized its anthologization. He describes it as a sleazy attempt to cash in on the new interest in sex in sf started by Philip Jose Farmer\'s 1952 story, \"The Lovers.\"
He also published a story, \"A Woman\'s Heart\" in the June 1957 Satellite which he considered so trivial that he never included it in any of his collections.
(taken from http://www.asimovonline.com/asimov_FAQ.html#non-literary12)
|
Texte Recomandate
