Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1 (1907-1948): 
Learning Curve

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) is generally considered the greatest American SF writer of the 20th century. A famous and bestselling author in later life, he started as a Navy man and graduate of Annapolis who was forced to retire because of tuberculosis.

Given his desire for privacy in the later decades of his life, he was both stranger and more interesting than one could ever have known. This is the first of two volumes of a major American biography. This volume is about Robert A. Heinlein's life up to the end of the 1940s and the mid-life crisis that changed him forever.