Robert Heinlein was born in Butler, Missouri. His childhood was spent in Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1929. He married Eleanor Curry in 1929, but the marriage lasted only a year. He served in the U.S. Navy as a communications officer on the aircraft carrier USS Lexington in 1931, and on the destroyer USS Roper in 1933-1934. He married his second wife, Leslyn Macdonald, in 1932. In 1934 he diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis and was discharged from the Navy. After his hospitalization, he became active in politics, first working for the campaign of Upton Sinclair for Governor of California in 1934, then running himself for the California State Assembly in 1938, though he was unsuccessful. After the campaign, he turned to writing in order to pay off his mortgage and in 1939, his first published story, Life-Line, was printed in Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. During World War II, he did aeronautical engineering for the U.S. Navy. He and his second wife divorced in 1947, and the following year he married Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld.

He and his wife moved to Colorado, then to Bonny Doon, California. Beginning in 1970, he had a series of health crises, beginning with a life-threatening attack of peritonitis, recovery from which required more than two years. Then, while vacationing in Tahiti in early 1978, he suffered a transient ischemic attack. He was diagnosed with a blocked carotid artery, and he had one of the earliest known carotid bypass operations to correct it. His surgical treatment re-energized Heinlein, and he wrote five novels from 1980 until he died in his sleep from emphysema and heart failure in May of 1988.

Over the course of his career, he published 32 novels, 59 short stories, and 16 collections. Four films, two TV series, several episodes of a radio series, and a board game have been derived from his work. Three non-fiction books and two poems have been published posthumously. One novel has been published posthumously and another, based on a sketchy outline by Heinlein, was published in September 2006. Four collections have been published posthumously