Isaac Asimov
1 book analyzed
Biography
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) was born in Russia and immigrated to Brooklyn as a child. He earned a PhD in biochemistry from Columbia in 1948 and spent decades as a faculty member at Boston University School of Medicine, though he eventually devoted himself entirely to writing. By the time of his death he had published over 500 books spanning virtually every section of the Dewey Decimal System. He began writing the Foundation stories as a graduate student, submitting them to legendary editor John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction magazine. The stories were conceived during World War II, and the fall of the Galactic Empire was explicitly modeled on the fall of Rome as described in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Asimov was also responding to the rise of fascism in Europe: the idea that a scientifically literate group could preserve human knowledge through a civilizational collapse was his version of hope.