General Discussion

His second wife (he was married briefly right out of Annapolis, but they lived together for only a few weeks before divorcing after a year), Leslyn, was a socialist. Heinlein had been pretty much apolitical until their marriage. He became active in leftist politics in California, especially in the EPIC gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair.

After the war he divorced Leslyn and married Virginia Gerstenfeld, an organic chemist and biochemist he met while working at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia during the war. Ginny was very conservative, and he began moving toward her political views.

More closely related to this thread, she often urged him to write a story based on Kipling’s Mowgli — which ultimately became Stranger. After Heinlein’s death in 1988, she began publishing previously unseen works, including the uncut version of Stranger. She had also okayed the publication of the unedited draft of I Will Fear No Evil in 1970, while Heinlein was recovering from peritonitis. I think it’s the weakest of his books — including the weird stuff he wrote in the 1980s.