But as James Gifford has pointed out in Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader's Companion (Nitrosyncretic Press, 2000), the story is not quite that simple. There was indeed a writing contest, but in the October 1938 Thrilling Wonder Stories. However, there was no $50 prize; instead, it was a call for submissions, at the normal word rates. Future great science fiction writer Alfred Bester won that contest and had his first story printed in the April 1939 issue, when Heinlein was just starting "Life-Line"—which shows another flaw in the polished myth: the contest was already publicly won before Heinlein even began his intended submission.
Bester never had a single story rejected by any editor or publisher—but Heinlein did.
In fact, Heinlein faced a number of rejections. His second sale to Campbell, "Misfit," was accepted only with revisions, and Campbell rejected six of his next stories, one right after another. Those six rejections accelerated a learning process into writing the kind of science fiction Campbell would buy. And before Astounding, even before For Us ,The Living, Heinlein had tasted literary rejection. When he was in the navy, serving on the aircraft carrier Lexington, he had entered a short story in a shipboard writing contest. "Weekend Watch," a little tale of espionage and intrigue at the Naval Academy, still survives in the Heinlein archives at UC Santa Cruz.
Heinlein lost that contest.
Perhaps his most significant rejection came before he wrote "Life-Line." He had already written a complete novel: For Us, The Living, which was rejected first by Macmillan, who kept it for some time, and then by Random House, who returned it after only a month in June of 1939.
Precisely when the novel was written is a matter for scholarly conjecture, but the general date is fixed in a letter Heinlein wrote to Campbell on December 18, 1939: "A year ago I wrote a full length novel." That places the window of composition between August 1938, when Heinlein lost his bid for California State Assembly, and April 1939, when he wrote "Life-Line." In August 1934, Heinlein returned to California with his second wife, Leslyn, from a long hospital treatment for the tuberculosis that ended his naval career (Heinlein had a very brief first marriage in the late twenties). He briefly sat in on classes at UCLA—he was never formally enrolled there, nor did he ever audit classes officially—and he soon realized that he would not be able to afford postgraduate study, even if he could surmount the fact that Annapolis granted no undergraduate degrees at that time, making it difficult, if not impossible, to convince UCLA to admit him to graduate school.
Fortunately, in the fall of 1934, Heinlein encountered something far more exciting than running an academic obstacle course. Upton Sinclair is best known today for the 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. In 1934, he was also known for a whole series of novels and books crusading for socialism and radical change—and for running for California governor as a member of the Socialist Party. For the 1934 campaign, he had left the Socialist Party for the Democratic ticket. Sinclair's crusade electrified the nation, and terrorized the Republican Party, which had long been accustomed to controlling California. Robert Heinlein became deeply involved in Sinclair's Utopian vision for California: End Poverty in California, better known as EPIC.
EPIC was one of the many plans put forward by various American political figures to solve the problems of the Great Depression, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal; Huey P. Long's Share the Wealth (tax the rich 100 percent after their first million dollars of income, then redistribute the wealth to everyone else); Dr. Francis Townsend's Old Age Revolving Pension Plan (give senior citizens $200 a month); and the Technocracy movement (put engineers and scientists in charge of society). FDR curtailed many of these movements by co-opting their best ideas. He raised the income tax on the rich to disarm Share the Wealth's appeal and instituted Social Security in 1935 to supplant Dr. Townsend.
Sinclair's idea for EPIC can be boiled down to a single phrase:
"production for use"—a phrase which is ridiculed in the 1940 Cary Grant/Rosalind Russell classic, His Girl Friday. He suggested that California had two untapped resources: factories and farms that had been closed down, and the unemployed. Why not combine them, so that all the unused land and facilities could be used by the unemployed to produce the goods and services they needed for themselves? They would use scrip to run their economies, and anything left over as surplus could be sold to the general population. On paper, it looked like a simple equation.
In reality, it provoked two responses: one, a wild joy on the part of Sinclair's followers that the problems of the Depression could be solved, and two, a great fear on the part of California's wealthy that the Socialist Revolution had come for their heads—and wallets. The memories of the Russian Revolution were sharp for these wealthy capitalists, who viewed EPIC as a communist plot. The movie industry in particular went to war, producing phony "newsreels" that were far from representative of Sinclair's plans, making it seem as though the communists and the nation's unemployed would turn life in California into a nightmare. The Hearst newspapers and the Los Angeles Times went to work as well, destroying Sinclair's hopes for election at every opportunity. FDR hammered the final nail into the coffin when he refused to endorse Sinclair as the Democratic candidate, seeing little reason to spend political capital on a potential rival.
So Upton Sinclair lost the election.
But Robert Heinlein did not give up the fight.
He was a neophyte political volunteer in the 1934 election, although he was quickly given six precincts to run. But after Sinclair's loss, Heinlein began to move up in the Democratic Party, to carry on the EPIC fight over the next four years. Eventually, he helped write and edit the EPIC newsletter (with a circulation of two million in 1934), became a major player in the Democratic Party in Los Angeles, helped write the platform for the state EPIC movement, and served at the state level of the Democratic Party on the California State Central Committee. In 1938, Robert Heinlein moved from behind the scenes and took up the race for political office, running for California State Assembly.
His opponent was the Republican incumbent, corporate attorney Charles Lyons. Their district included Beverly Hills and part of Hollywood, which at that time were not only wealthy, but also conservative and Republican. Heinlein had only a small group of supporters in his campaign, because the Democratic Party believed there was no way to win that seat. He fought the good fight, but because his opponent had cross-filed as a Democrat for the primaries (which eventually became illegal in California), if Heinlein lost the primary, Lyons would automatically win the election—as the only candidate. Heinlein lost, by fewer than five hundred votes.
In many ways, the 1938 election was a triumph for the Democrats—they gained the governor's seat for former EPIC member Culbert Olson and a number of state assembly seats. Although Heinlein's loss stung, it did not end his political involvement. He continued in Democratic politics at least until 1940, when he attended the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as an observer with press credentials.
Still, with his formal education stalled and his political career stymied, where would he turn to pay off the mortgage on his house? His naval disability pension would be enough to keep the Heinleins fed and clothed, but not enough to cope with the mortgage, and in 1938, owing money to a bank was still somewhat shameful.