Biography
Asimov was born around January 2, 1920 (his date of birth for official purposes—the precise date is not certain) in Petrovichi shtetl of Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia) to Anna Rachel Berman Asimov and Judah Asimov, a Jewish family of millers. They emigrated to the United States when he was three years old; since the parents always spoke Yiddish and English with little Isaac, he never learned Russian. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, he taught himself to read at the age of five, and remained fluent in Yiddish as well as English.
Work in shop
His parents owned a candy store and everyone in the family was expected to work in it. He saw science fiction magazines in the store and began reading them. In his mid-teens, he began to write his own stories and soon was selling them to pulp magazines.He graduated from Columbia University in 1939 and took a Ph.D. in chemistry there in 1948. In between, he spent three years during World War II working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station. After the war ended, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving for just under nine months before receiving an honorable discharge.
In the course of his brief military career, he rose to Corporal on the basis of his typing skills and narrowly avoided participating in the 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. After gaining his doctorate, he joined the faculty of Boston University, with which he remained associated thereafter, but in a non-teaching capacity.
Professor
The university ceased to pay him a salary in 1958, by which time his income from writing already exceeded his income from his academic duties. Asimov remained on the faculty as an associate professor, being promoted in 1979 to full professor, and his personal papers from 1965 onward are archived at Boston University's Mugar Memorial Library, where they consume 464 boxes on 71 meters of shelf space. In 1985, he became President of the American Humanist Association and remained in that position until his death in 1992; his successor was his friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.He married Gertrude Blugerman on July 26, 1942, with whom he had two children, David (b. 1951) and Robyn Joan (b. 1955).
After an extended separation, they were divorced in 1973, and Asimov married Janet O. Jeppson later that year.Asimov was a claustrophile; that is, he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. In his first volume of autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City Subway station, within which he imagined he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains.Asimov was afraid of flying, only doing so twice in his entire life (once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia during the Second World War and once returning home from the army base in Oahu in 1946).
Traveling on great distances
He seldom traveled great distances, partly because his aversion to aircraft made the logistics of long-distance travel extremely complicated. In his later years, he found he enjoyed traveling on cruise ships, and on several occasions he became part of the cruises' "entertainment", giving science-themed talks on ships like the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2.His physical dexterity was very poor. He never learned how to swim or ride a bicycle, although he did learn to drive a car and found he enjoyed it. He did not learn to operate a car until after he moved to Boston, Massachusetts; in his jokebook Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston driving as "anarchy on wheels".Asimov died on April 6, 1992.
He was survived by his second wife, Janet, and his children from his first marriage. Ten years after his death, Janet Asimov's edition of Isaac's autobiography, It's Been a Good Life, revealed that his death was caused by AIDS; he had contracted HIV from an infected blood transfusion during heart bypass surgery in 1983. The actual cause of death was heart and renal failure as complications of AIDS. Janet Asimov claims that Isaac's doctors encouraged them not to reveal his illness, while the doctors claim it was Janet herself who wanted to keep it secret.
Intellectual positions
Isaac Asimov was a humanist and a rationalist. He did not oppose genuine religious conviction in others but was against superstitious or unfounded beliefs.Asimov was a progressive on most political issues, and a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party. In a television interview in the early 1970s he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was unhappy at what he saw as an irrationalist tack taken by many progressive political activists from the late 1960s onwards. His defense of civil applications of nuclear power even after the Three Mile Island incident damaged his relations with some on the left.
He issued many appeals for population control reflecting the perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R. Ehrlich. In the closing years of his life, Asimov blamed the deterioration of the quality of life that he perceived in New York on the shrinking tax base caused by middle class flight to the suburbs. His last non-fiction book, Our Angry Earth (1991, co-written with science fiction author Frederik Pohl), deals with elements of the environmental crisis such as global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer.