I.Asimov: A Memoir by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov [Asimov, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780553569971
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1994-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

Histories

Houghton Mifflin was doing a series of American history books for youngsters, and Austin Olney asked if there was some subject I could handle that would fit into the series.

After thinking about it, I said I could do a book on Franklin’s investigations of electricity and its influence on the course of the American Revolution. Austin was willing, so I wrote a book entitled

The Kite That Won the Revolution.

The writer Sterling North was the general editor of the series, and when he saw my manuscript he clearly wanted to rewrite it closer to his heart’s desire. At least I received back a hacked-up manuscript that froze my blood. I had just escaped from the clutches of Svirsky and I did not propose to fall into those of North.

I told Austin I would have to withdraw the manuscript and explained why. Austin offered to publish it as I had written it, but explained that it could not then be entered as part of the series and

probably wouldn’t sell as well, for the series was well established and large sales would be virtually guaranteed. I said I didn’t care about sales at all, only about having a book of mine published as I wrote it and not as someone else wrote it. It was published in 1963 and its sales were only moderate, but I was happy.

After agreeing to do Realm of Numbers, which Austin had suggested, I argued him into Words of Science, a series of 250 one-page essays on derivations and explanations of scientific terms, arranged alphabetically. I remember working on those essays at the medical school with an unabridged Webster’s on the desk to one side of me. (After all, I couldn’t make up the etymologies of the words. I had to know precisely the forms of the Latin and Greek words from which they came.) Matthew Derow wandered in, looked over my shoulder, stared at Webster’s, and said, “All you’re doing is copying the dictionary.”

“That’s right,” I said. I closed the dictionary, lifted it with an effort, and handed it to him. “Here’s the dictionary, Matthew. I dare you to write the book.”

He didn’t take the dare.

The book did quite well, but the important thing was that I enjoyed doing it enormously, so I did Words from the Myths (1961), Words on the Map (1962), Words in Genesis (1962), and Words from the Exodus (1963), all by Houghton Mifflin.

I hadn’t had enough, so I cast about for other places besides mythology, geography, and the Bible that would serve as a source of words. I thought of my old passion, history, and prepared a book entitled Words from Greek History, in which I told the history of Greece, stopping every once in a while to discuss words that we used that were derived from that history.

Austin went over the manuscript and said he liked the history far more than he did the word derivations and that was all I had to hear. I discarded the manuscript and set about writing a straight history of Greece for young people.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.