John Wood Campbell Jr. was an American science fiction writer and editor. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction from late 1937 until his death, he is generally credited with shaping the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Isaac Asimov called Campbell "the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely."
As a writer, Campbell published super-science space opera under his own name and moody stories under his primary and...
Lester del Rey was born Leonard Knapp in Saratoga, Minnesota, the son of poor sharecroppers of partly Spanish ancestry. His mother died shortly after his birth, and he managed to complete high school and two years at George Washington University before dropping out for economic reasons. He started publishing stories in pulp magazines in the late 1930s. He was closely associated Astounding Science Fiction, then the leading science fiction magazine. In 1935, his first wife was killed in a car ac...
Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers. Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2. His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old. He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of...
Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba. Early in his career he wrote for true confession pulp magazines like True Story, but in the late 1930s he began writing science fiction, which he was more interested in. His first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" was published in 1939, and is considered to be one of the first works of the Golden Age of science fiction. In 1941 he left his job at the Department of National Defence to...
Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988) was an American science fiction writer, born in Butler, Missouri. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1929 and served in the Navy until 1934, afterwards studying mathematics and physics briefly at UCLA. He sold his first story, "Life-Line", to Astounding Science Fiction in 1939 and became one of that magazine's leading contributors. In the late 1940s he was among the first science fiction authors to place work in general-interest magazines such...