"Heinlein Gets the Last Word" is a review of the unabridged edition of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, which was originally published in 1961. The review appeared in the New York Times Book Review on December 9, 1990.
Summary[]
At a recent dinner party, publisher Tom Maschler asked which novel was the best. Vonnegut nominated Madame Bovary while the majority settled on the more glamorous Anna Karenina. Afterward, Vonnegut realized that both works focused on "a stratified and codified little society" rather than the world at large. A few months before, Tom Wolfe had said that fiction authors should focus on stories of little groups. Now the full text of Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land has been prepared, which has sold over five million copies in its original form. Despite this success and the publication of about 40 other books, Heinlein's name was never spoken at a meeting of PEN or in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, nor even included in "Who's Who". This is because professional critics, teachers, and authors who write about "ordinary people in provincial societies" cannot tolerate a novel about a person raised on Mars who had never seen another human being.

Robert and Virginia Heinlein, 1980
This rejection is not based on the intelligence or craft involved in the work, but is simple prejudice and snobbery. Much as the Writers' Union in the Soviet Union routinely rejected authors for their politically incorrect ideas, so too are authors like Heinlein shut out because his tales—which are about the place of human beings in the universe at large—are about places and people in which the literary establishment has no interest. For the same reason, works such as Candide and Gulliver's Travels are not held in much regard, but Vonnegut feels all three works would have been worth championing as the greatest novel. This version restores some 60,000 words cut from the 1961 edition through the efforts of Heinlein's widow Virginia, who also wrote a preface recounting the history of the manuscript and its retrieval from a forgotten vault in the University of California at Santa Cruz library. Vonnegut makes no claims about whether the work is improved by these additions, but since the original version was brilliant enough, they are likely only "Icing on a cake which for people who like that kind of cake was already quite satisfactory". That said, he would still not claim it to be superior to Madame Bovary.[1]
See Also[]
- "Science Fiction", an article that addresses the stigmatization of the genre
- ↑ "Heinlein Gets the Last Word", New York Times Book Review, December 9, 1990, pg. 13.