In his posthumous collection of letters, Robert Heinlein reaches the same conclusion as fellow Missourian Mark Twain about the candor of being a dead writer.
"It's amazing how frank and acidly funny one can be when one is certain it will never see print until the writer is safely out of reach," science fiction writer Heinlein wrote to his agent in 1973.Heinlein was plotting a tell-all book about the nasty side of publishing. The book - to be called "Grumbles From the Grave" - would be told "as if with a Ouija board," the same plan Twain adopted for what he considered his most scandalous writing, not intended for publication for up to a century after his death.
Heinlein, who died in 1988, never wrote "Grumbles From the Grave." But his wife, Virginia, has edited a collection of letters - mostly to and from Heinlein's agent, Lurton Blassingame - and packaged them under the same title.
Like Twain's posthumous writing, Heinlein's letters are tame compared with the works published in his lifetime.
In such 1980s Heinlein novels as "The Number of the Beast," "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" and "To Sail Beyond the Sunset," sex runs rampant among almost everyone, while marriages spring up at a nod between virtual strangers. As shockers go, letters about the Heinleins' homebuilt water pumps don't quite stack up against those last novels.
Yet the letters in "Grumbles" do offer insights into the personal side of Heinlein, who shunned interviews.
"Those spots on the right margin are my blood, a drop per line," Heinlein wrote in 1941 to John W. Campbell Jr., who published Heinlein's first stories in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction. - David Germain (AP).