Nice find, and one I really should assign a NHOL number.

Bill, were you aware of this? It rings a faint bell as something once mentioned but I'd certainly lost the note.

A neat find, thanks!

I'm particularly pleased by the background info on Rocket Ship Galileo: in my opinion, a generally undervalued novel.

I find it surprising that he discussed Leslyn in 1952. What an excellent find.

It's possible that Heinlein wrote the essay for Young Wings magazine years before it was included in the 1952 collection. If he'd just completed Rocket Ship Galileo, as implied, this would indicate 1947 or perhaps late '46, when he was still married to Leslyn. Is there a date for the Young Wings version?

Google Books was where I originally found the reference to this piece. It doesn't contain any more info than has already been posted here, and the metadata it posts for serials is notoriously unreliable.

WorldCat lists no copies of the periodical version anywhere near me, nor of the book version which I quoted. However, I spent last week at WPAFB in Dayton, OH on business, and the library of Antioch College in nearby Yellow Springs (where Stephen Jay Gould went to school, as did Rod Serling) has a copy of the book and was close enough by that I stopped there Friday on the way to the Cincinnati Airport and copied the relevant pages of the book.

Google Books does host a "snippet view" of both versions of the article. For the one found in Young Wings, the next to last paragraph says "my first piece of fiction was our [sic] book Rocket Ship Galileo." The book version I quote above changes that to "my book Rocket Ship Galileo." I don't want to read too much into what is probably the correction of a typo, but what did he mean by "our" book -- did he consider either Leslyn or Virginia to be of such substantial help he thought of her as a co-author? And was this in fact his first piece of fiction after the war? (Sorry, Jim G., I don't have a copy of your book handy right now.)

Bill hasn't responded to this, but I for one am shocked that a book published in 1952 mentions Leslyn, after the hell she put him through.

My answer for this is that this was obviously written around the time of Rocketship Galileo, perhaps as an autobio for the flyleaf, and then it was printed considerably later in this book.

By 1952, there is no way on the Green Hills of Earth that a) he would have mentioned Leslyn publicly and b) left out Ginny.