Isaac Asimov died in 1992 at the age of 72. His brother Stanley Asimov took 18 months to compile letters and excerpts of letters. Stanley died in August, 1995, and the book is copyrighted in 1995. I think Stanley did a good job. The tons of trivia and warm emotion of Isaac Asomov come through like a fix for a junkie.

Boston University has a 6-story library with the papers and works of a number of 20th century writers. Isaac Asomov takes up more than his share of space, with more than 470 published books and 464 boxes of letters, manuscripts and proofs that take up 232 feet of shelf space. Some of his books were translated into 40 languages. I would like to visit Boston University!

Isaac got his mail early every day, and answered almost every letter each day before he started work on one of the books he always had going. (Mysteries took as little as 6 days.) There were over 1000 pounds of carbons of Isaac's 45,000 letters to various folks for his brother to wade through in preparation of YOURS, ISAAC ASIMOV, and Stanley read them for a year. Stanley estimates that Isaac wrote another 45,000 postcards which are not represented at Boston University. Many folks sent him copies of their cards when they heard about his project.

I laughed about Isaac's reason for taking up novels in the 80's after writing non-fiction for 20 years. He said he loved writing non-fiction, that it was ten times as easy to write and a hundred times as much fun as fiction. But he believed that Ronald Reagan's presidency would bring on hard economic times, and he felt he owed it to his wife and kids to make as much money as he could to see them through the bad times.

Isaac estimated that he typed 150,000 words a day, most at 90 words a minute. (I type 15.) He WROTE at 90 words per minute from 7:30 am to 10:30 pm for 7 days a week and loved every minute of it. He made a few corrections to his rough draft, and typed the final copy. He shed tears when rereading his "The Lost Dog" or "The Ugly Little Boy" because they were sad stories. He almost never wrote emotional stories. His heroes had opponents, but the opponents were good intentioned folk. He made science understandable, and was President of the American Humanist Association for years.

Isaac refused to simplify his works for children according to sentence length formulas, but he was a writer for World Book Encyclopedia for years. He said, "I simply make use of the English language. I never use a long word when a short one will do, or an involved construction when a simple one will do, or literary trickery when plain speaking will do. Doing all that, I am capable of convincingly treating my readers as my intellectual equals, and in return for that, they will go to all lengths to understand me."

He gave lots of speeches, and would not prepare for them. When a medical convention "talk" turned out to be "reading papers", he faked it and gave a good speech on DNA. It was printed in the New York Journal of Medicine and generated 300 requests for reprints from countries all over the world. Isaac thought it was a hoot.