He returned to the notes for the other story in fits and starts over the next decade. The eventual result was "Stranger in a Strange Land," which introduced the character Valentine Michael Smith as a baby raised by Martians on Mars with a wisdom far beyond that of any earthling.
The author turned in a manuscript 800 pages long. His publishers, fearful of some of the contents, including lengthy descriptions of Martian sex, requested a big reduction, of about 250 pages.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday January 28, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 13 inches; 470 words Type of Material: Correction
Heinlein obituary -- The obituary of Virginia Heinlein, literary manager and muse of her husband, science fiction author Robert Heinlein, in the California section Sunday erroneously stated that his rank on leaving the Navy was first lieutenant. It was lieutenant junior grade.
"He always resented the fact they had made him cut a substantial amount of his work," Silver said. "She wanted it restored." But it took an act of Congress and Robert Heinlein's death before that could be accomplished.
In 1976, Congress passed a law that allowed renegotiation of copyright issues after an author's death. The copyright for "Stranger" came up the year after Heinlein died, in 1988.
Virginia requested a copy of the original manuscript, which was archived at UC Santa Cruz along with other papers. "I ... read that and the published version side by side," she wrote. "And I came to the conclusion that it had been a mistake to cut the book."
In 1990, the unexpurgated, 220,000-word version of "Stranger" was published by Ace/G.P. Putnam's Sons. Reviewers were split over the new edition. Some, like Rudy Rucker in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, preferred the older, shorter version, commenting that much of the material restored in the new one was "glaringly sexist." Others, such as novelist Kurt Vonnegut, found the restorations salutary. Writing in the New York Times, he pronounced them "icing on a cake which for people who like that kind of cake was already quite satisfactory."
The Heinleins married in 1948, a few years after they met at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia, where she was a chemist and aviation test engineer and he a civilian engineer. He had been a first lieutenant in the Navy before receiving a medical discharge because of tuberculosis in 1934. She was his assistant, even though as a lieutenant commander she outranked him.
A Brooklyn dentist's daughter who majored in chemistry at New York University, she was an accomplished swimmer and diver who reached national competitive levels in figure skating. She spoke seven languages, including French, Latin and Russian, and studied for a doctorate in biochemistry at UCLA.
