Within a year, Heinlein -- under his own name and his alias, "Anson MacDonald" -- would be several of Astounding's top authors. He regularly finished both first and second in the reader polls under both names and was the best-paid writer in the business.

Being the leader was more important to him as the money. In a 1941 letter to editor John Campbell, he told Campbell that if Astounding had to cut rates, "I will go back to a cent and a quarter a word without a murmur, provided it is the highest rate you pay anyone. As long as you pay anyone a cent and a half, I want it."

New worlds to conquer
Heinlein took great pride in raising the standards of science fiction, feeling that he had shifted it from an emphasis on gadgetry and hero-versus-villain stories to stories that emphasized realistic human psychology.

He was also constantly looking for new markets to conquer. As early as 1941, he wrote about wanting to break into the "slicks," the mainstream, relatively high-budget magazine market epitomized by the Saturday Evening Post. He made it out of the pulp ghetto with "The Green Hills of Earth" in late 1946, when he was already investigating another new field: the SF novel.

In the late 1940s, few if any American publishers would touch SF books for adults. The pulps had claimed science fiction in the late 1920s, and as far as the mainstream press was concerned, they were welcome to it. Heinlein wrote a few short novels for the magazines in the '40s and might have wanted to do more, but there was nowhere to sell them.

The one noteworthy exception was the juvenile market. Tom Swift and his brethren sold well, ensuring that Heinlein always kept one eye on children's publishers. In March of 1946, he started circulating a manuscript he called Young Atomic Engineers, and it had found a home with Scribner's by September. Under the editorial gaze of Alice Dalgliesh, the book reached the shelves in 1947 as Rocket Ship Galileo.

The book, Heinlein's first book-length SF effort, was a hit. Kids read it, libraries bought it, and in February of 1948 Heinlein's agent told him that there was no danger of Scribner's turning down the follow-up book, Space Cadet.

Jumping through hoops
Even for an editor, Alice Dalgliesh was an odd duck. She praised Heinlein's writing to the skies, told him every book was wonderful ... and wanted major revisions in them all.

That's not so unusual. Editors do that all the time, probably because they enjoy driving writers crazy. What made Alice Dalgliesh so eccentric were the things she wanted changed.

She objected to the Martian setting of Heinlein's Red Planet, calling it too much of a "fairy tale" and "not our sort of science fiction." Heinlein was angry, not least because he had put considerable research and mathematical effort into the planet's conditions.

It didn't help that Dalgliesh shot down his suggestion of Hubert Rogers as a cover artist by pointing out Rogers' work in "cheap" magazines like Astounding. The example she used to back up her opinion was the October 1941 issue, which featured as the cover story "By His Bootstraps". Unfortunately, the story was by "Anson MacDonald".

Dalgliesh was also obsessed with possible sexual elements in Heinlein's books for the young and impressionable. She was convinced that the character Willis, a young Martian adopted by Red Planet's hero, had Freudian sexual connotations.

Both Heinlein and his agent were mystified by this, but the writer consciously avoided sexual imagery in later books for Scribner's. It didn't do much good.

In The Rolling Stones, Heinlein created "flat cats," a sexless, parthenogenic pet that would (unconsciously) inspire David Gerrold to create Star Trek's tribbles. Dalgliesh wrote they were "Freudian in their pulsing love habits". She was also convinced an anecdote about a Vermonter who made a pet out of a cow suggested abnormal sex practices.

Pushing the juvenile envelope
By the time The Star Beast was published in 1954, Heinlein was finding the "nonsense" involved in writing the juveniles in the deeply repressed 1950s to be increasingly "irksome."

This time it wasn't just Dalgliesh on his case. A reviewer at Library Journal was shocked that a character in Star Beast had "divorced" her parents, and called for the book to be withdrawn. What especially annoyed Heinlein was that he had simply given a verb to a process -- removing a child from unsuitable parents and placing it under new guardianship -- that was already an accepted part of 1950s society.

Heinlein was still proud of the books, however, and found the response to them so warm that he gave priority to them over his adult writing. He was pushing the envelope even as he tried to step carefully around others' prejudices.

While the early juveniles were fairly tame romps with little violence and no deep issues, the later books increasingly tackled disturbing topics head on. Tunnel in the Sky is an excellent example of this evolving approach. Even before things go wrong, Rod Walker's final exam in advanced survival has only one way to pass: don't get killed. Death is more than an abstract possibility -- a minor character who only thinks he's well-prepared is dead minutes after the exam begins, and he's not the last to die as the book moves toward its close.

However, Rod and his classmates do more than survive. They build a organized society in the wilderness, one that's largely misunderstood when they're finally found. Politics and responsibility are important themes in Tunnel that would see more extensive development in Stranger in a Strange Land.

Citizen of the Galaxy, the final Scribner's juvenile, goes even further. By this point, the relatively sheltered protagonists of the earlier juveniles are long gone, replaced by Thorby, is a brutally mistreated slave boy whose first step upwards in the world is to become a beggar.

Moreover, although Thorby also happens to be the scion of a rich and powerful family, his almost-alien upbringing leads him to reject their materialistic hypocrisy when he finally comes home. In many ways, Thorby bears a distinct resemblance to a character named Valentine Michael Smith.

Childhood's end
In 1959, Heinlein hit his breaking point, and could no longer tolerate the meddling of others. He submitted Starship Troopers at the last possible moment to give Dalgliesh a minimum of time to become nervous about its ideas. His letters about the book and bald announcement he would not change it to suit her now had a defiant tone.

He didn't have to worry. The editorial board at Scribner's, including the publisher, rejected Starship Troopers as inappropriate for children. Even Heinlein considered the book an adult novel that young people could read.

Putnam snapped the book up and Starship Troopers went on to win the Hugo award, define the subgenre of "military science fiction" and start political SF controversies that are still argued today.

There was no going back. Heinlein tried once with Podkayne of Mars, but found it difficult to reconcile himself to the happy ending the publisher forced him to write. The book was left suffering from a wildly uneven tone and from then on he wrote only for adults.

Although Heinlein eventually abandoned the experiment of writing SF for children, the Scribner's juveniles were still a crucial learning experience, refining his technique and building his audience. He would find new readers with books like Stranger in a Strange Land, but many of his long-term fans were boys introduced to the wider world of SF by his books.

Just as importantly, the juveniles also secured his financial position, affording him the freedom to experiment by writing novels without having to tailor them to existing markets.

All that aside, the most important contribution the juveniles may have made to Heinlein's later work was that they confined him, boxed him in and put him under pressure. He was an extremely stubborn man, and so it was only inevitable that he would revolt under the restrictions placed on him by Dalgliesh and others.