Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov (c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992, Russian Айзек Азимов IPA: ) was a Russian-born American Jewish author and biochemist, a highly successful and exceptionally prolific writer best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series, which was part of one of his two major series, the Galactic Empire Series later combined with Robot series. He also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as a great amount of non-fiction. Asimov wrote or edited over 500 volumes and an estimated 90,000 letters or postcards, and he has works in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System except Philosophy. Asimov was by general consensus a master of the science-fiction genre and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, was considered to be one of the "Big Three" science-fiction writers during his lifetime. Most of Asimov's popularized science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going back as far as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. He often gives nationalities, birth dates and death dates for the scientists he mentions, as well as etymologies and pronunciation guides for technical terms. Examples of this style include his Guide to Science, the three-volume set Understanding Physics, and Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. Asimov was a long-time member of Mensa, albeit reluctantly; he described them as "intellectually combative." He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association. The asteroid 5020 Asimov is named in his honor.

Biography

Asimov was born around January 2, 1920 (his date of birth for official purposes—the precise date is not certain) in Petrovichi shtetl of Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia) to Anna Rachel Berman Asimov and Judah Asimov, a Jewish family of millers. They emigrated to the United States when he was three years old; since the parents always spoke Yiddish and English with little Isaac, he never learned Russian. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, he taught himself to read at the age of five, and remained fluent in Yiddish as well as English. His parents owned a small general store and everyone in the family was expected to work in it. He saw science fiction magazines in the store and began reading them. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories and few years later he was selling them to pulp magazines. pulp magazine He graduated from Columbia University in 1939 and took a Ph.D. in chemistry there in 1948. In between, he spent three years during World War II working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station. After the war ended, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving for just under nine months before receiving an honorable discharge. In the course of his brief military career, he rose to Corporal on the basis of his typing skills and narrowly avoided participating in the 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. After gaining his doctorate, he joined the faculty of Boston University, with which he remained associated thereafter, but in a non-teaching capacity. The university ceased to pay him a salary in 1958, by which time his income from writing already exceeded his income from his academic duties. Asimov remained on the faculty as an associate professor, being promoted in 1979 to full professor, and his personal papers from 1965 onward are archived at Boston University's Mugar Memorial Library, where they consume 464 boxes on 71 metres of shelf space. In 1985, he became President of the American Humanist Association and remained in that position until his death in 1992; his successor was his friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. He was a close friend of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. He married Gertrude Blugerman (1917-1990) on July 26, 1942, with whom he had two children, David (b. 1951) and Robyn Joan (b. 1955). After an extended separation, they were divorced in 1973, and Asimov married Janet O. Jeppson later that year. Gertrude, born in Canada, died in Boston in 1990. Asimov was a claustrophile; that is, he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. In his first volume of autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City Subway station, within which he imagined he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains. Asimov was afraid of flying, only doing so twice in his entire life (once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia during the Second World War and once returning home from the army base in Oahu in 1946). He seldom traveled great distances, partly because his aversion to aircraft made the logistics of long-distance travel extremely complicated. In his later years, he found he enjoyed traveling on cruise ships, and on several occasions he became part of the cruises' "entertainment", giving science-themed talks on ships like the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2. His physical dexterity was very poor. He never learned how to swim or ride a bicycle, although he did learn to drive a car and found he enjoyed it. He did not learn to operate a car until after he moved to Boston, Massachusetts; in his jokebook Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston driving as "anarchy on wheels". Asimov died on April 6, 1992. He was survived by his second wife, Janet, and his children from his first marriage. Ten years after his death, Janet Asimov's edition of Isaac's autobiography, It's Been a Good Life, revealed that his death was caused by AIDS; he had contracted HIV from an infected blood transfusion during heart bypass surgery in 1983. The actual cause of death was heart and renal failure as complications of AIDS. Janet Asimov claims that Isaac's doctors encouraged him not to reveal his illness, and she waited until the doctors had passed away to make the information public. Others have claimed it was Janet herself who wanted to keep it secret (see [http://www.locusmag.com/2002/Issue04/Letter.html]).

Intellectual positions

Isaac Asimov was a humanist and a rationalist. He did not oppose genuine religious conviction in others but was against superstitious or unfounded beliefs. Asimov was a progressive on most political issues, and a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party. In a television interview in the early 1970s he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was unhappy at what he saw as an irrationalist track taken by many progressive political activists from the late 1960s onwards. In his autobiography In Joy Still Felt, he recalls meeting the counterculture figure Abbie Hoffmann; Asimov's impression was that the 1960s' counterculture heroes had ridden an emotional wave which, in the end, left them stranded in a "no-man's land of the spirit" from which he wondered if they would ever return. (This attitude echoes a famous passage in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.) His defense of civil applications of nuclear power even after the Three Mile Island incident damaged his relations with some on the left. He issued many appeals for population control reflecting the perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R. Ehrlich. Asimov considered himself a feminist even before Women's Liberation became a widespread movement; he joked that he wished women to be free "because I hate it when they charge". More seriously, he argued that the issue of women's rights was closely connected to that of population control. Furthermore, he believed that homosexuality must be considered a "moral right" on population grounds, as must all consenting adult sexual activity which does not lead to reproduction (Yours, Isaac Asimov). In the closing years of his life, Asimov blamed the deterioration of the quality of life that he perceived in New York on the shrinking tax base caused by middle class flight to the suburbs. His last non-fiction book, Our Angry Earth (1991, co-written with science fiction author Frederik Pohl), deals with elements of the environmental crisis such as global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer.

Asimov's writing career

Overview

ozone layer Asimov's career can be divided into several time periods. His early career, dominated by science fiction, began with short stories in 1939 and novels in 1950. This lasted until about 1958, all but ending after publication of The Naked Sun. He began publishing nonfiction in 1952, co-authoring a college-level textbook called Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. Following the brief orbit of the first man-made satellite Sputnik I by the USSR in 1957, his production of nonfiction, particularly popular science books, greatly increased, with a consequent drop in his science fiction output. Over the next quarter century, he would write only four science fiction novels. Starting in 1982, the second half of his science fiction career began with the publication of Foundation's Edge. From then until his death, Asimov would publish several sequels and prequels to his existing novels, tying them together in a way he had not originally anticipated. In his own view, Asimov believed that his most enduring contributions would be his "Three Laws of Robotics" and the Foundation Series (see Yours, Isaac Asimov, p. 329). Furthermore, the Oxford English Dictionary credits his science fiction for introducing the words positronic (an entirely fictional technology), psychohistory (frequently used in a different sense than the imaginary one Asimov employed) and robotics into the English language. Asimov coined the term robotics without suspecting that it might be an original word; at the time, he believed it was simply the natural analogue of mechanics, hydraulics and so forth. (The original word robot derives from the Czech word for "forced labor", robota, and was first employed by the playwright Karel Capek.) Unlike his other two coinages, the word robotics continues in mainstream and technical use with Asimov's original definition. Star Trek: The Next Generation featured androids with "positronic brains", giving Asimov full credit for inventing this (fictional) technology.

Science fiction

Asimov began contributing stories to science fiction magazines in 1939, "Marooned Off Vesta" being his first published story, written when he was 18. Two and a half years later, he published his 32nd short story, "Nightfall" (1941), which has been described as one of "the most famous science-fiction stories of all time" [http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue8/asimov.html]. In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story ever written [http://www.rudysbooks.com/asimovobit.html]. In his short anthology Nightfall and Other Stories he wrote, "The writing of 'Nightfall' was a watershed in my professional career ... I was suddenly taken seriously and the world of science fiction became aware that I existed. As the years passed, in fact, it became evident that I had written a 'classic'". "Nightfall" is an archetypical example of social science fiction, a term coined by Asimov to describe a new trend in the 1940's, led by authors including Asimov and Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition. space opera. The Foundation Series is among Asimov's most famous fiction works.]] In 1942 he began his Foundation stories—later collected in the Foundation Trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953)—which recount the collapse and rebirth of a vast interstellar empire in a universe of the future. Taken together, they are his most famous work of science fiction, along with the Robot Series. Many years later, he continued the series with Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986) and then went back to before the original trilogy with Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1992). The series features his fictional science of Psychohistory in which the future course of the history of large populations can be predicted. His robot stories—many of which were collected in I, Robot (1950)—were begun at about the same time. They promulgated a set of rules of ethics for robots (see Three Laws of Robotics) and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers and thinkers in their treatment of the subject. One such short story, "The Bicentennial Man", was made into a movie starring Robin Williams. The recent film I, Robot, starring Will Smith, was based on the Hardwired script by Jeff Vintar with Asimov's ideas incorporated later after acquiring the rights to the I, Robot title. It is not related to the I, Robot script by Harlan Ellison, who collaborated with Asimov himself to create a version that captured the spirit of the original. Asimov is quoted as saying that Ellison's screenplay would lead to "the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction movie ever made". The screenplay was published in book form in 1994, after hopes of seeing it in film form were becoming slim. See: I, Robot, [http://www.moviepoopshoot.com/bottom/56.html] Besides movies, his Foundation and robot stories have inspired other derivative works of science fiction literature, many by well-known and established authors such as Roger MacBride Allen, Greg Bear, and David Brin. These appear to have been done with the blessing, and often at the request of, Asimov's widow Janet Asimov. In 1948 he also wrote a spoof science article, "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". At the time, Asimov was preparing for his own doctoral dissertation. Fearing a prejudicial reaction from his Ph.D. evaluation board, he asked his editor that it be released under a pseudonym, yet it appeared under his own name. During his oral examination shortly thereafter, Asimov grew concerned at the scrutiny he received. At the end of the examination, one evaluator turned to him, smiling, and said "Mr. Asimov, tell us something about the thermodynamic properties of the compound thiotimoline." After a twenty-minute wait, he was summoned back into the Examination Room and congratulated as "Dr. Asimov." He continued writing short stories for science fiction magazines in the 1950s, which he referred to as his golden decade. A number of these are included in his Best of anthology, including "The Last Question" (1956), on the ability of humankind to cope with and reverse entropy. It was his personal favorite and considered by many to be a contender to "Nightfall". Asimov wrote of it in 1973, :Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn't have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of things endears any story to any writer. :Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don't remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably "The Last Question". This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, "Dr. Asimov, there's a story I think you wrote, whose title I can't remember—" at which point I interrupted to tell him it was "The Last Question" and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles. Beginning in 1977, he lent his name to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov's Science Fiction) and penned an editorial for each issue. There was also a short-lived Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine and a companion Asimov's Science Fiction Anthology reprint series, published as magazines (in the same manner as stablemates Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazines "anthologies").
Popular science
During the late 1950s and 1960s, Asimov shifted gears somewhat, and substantially decreased his fiction output (he published only four adult novels between 1957's The Naked Sun and 1982's Foundation's Edge, two of which were mysteries). At the same time, he greatly increased his non-fiction production, writing mostly on science topics; the launch of Sputnik in 1957 engendered public concern over a "science gap", which Asimov's publishers were eager to fill with as much material as he could write. Meanwhile, the monthly Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction invited him to continue his regular non-fiction column, begun in the now-folded bimonthly companion magazine Venture Science Fiction, ostensibly dedicated to popular science, but with Asimov having complete editorial freedom. The first of the F&SF columns appeared in November of 1958, and they followed uninterrupted thereafter, with 399 entries, until Asimov's terminal illness took its toll. These columns, periodically collected into books by his principal publisher, Doubleday, helped make Asimov's reputation as a "Great Explainer" of science and were referred to by him as his only pop-science writing in which he never had to assume complete ignorance of the subjects at hand on the part of his readers. The popularity of his first wide-ranging reference work, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science, also allowed him to give up most of his academic responsibilities and become essentially a full-time freelance writer. He published Asimov's Guide to the Bible in two volumes—covering the Old Testament in 1967 and the New Testament in 1969—and then combined them into one 1300-page volume in 1981. Replete with maps and tables, the guide goes through the books of the Bible in order, explaining the history of each one and the political influences that affected it, as well as biographical information about the important characters. Asimov also wrote several essays on the social contentions of his day, including "Thinking About Thinking" and "Science: Knock Plastic" (1967). The great variety of information covered in Asimov's writings once prompted Kurt Vonnegut to ask, "How does it feel to know everything?" Asimov replied that he only knew how it felt to have the reputation of omniscience—"Uneasy". (See In Joy Still Felt, chapter 30.) In the introduction to his story collection Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon admitted that he relied upon Asimov's science popularizations (and the Oxford English Dictionary) to provide his knowledge of entropy. It is a mark of the friendship and respect accorded Asimov by Arthur C. Clarke that the so-called "Asimov-Clarke Treaty of Park Avenue", put together as they shared a cab ride along Park Avenue in New York, stated that Asimov was required to insist that Clarke was the best science fiction writer in the world (reserving second best for himself), while Clarke was required to insist that Asimov was the best science writer in the world (reserving second best for himself). Thus the dedication in Clarke's book Report on Planet Three (1972) reads: "In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer."
Other
In addition to his interest in science, Asimov was also greatly interested in history. Starting in the 1960s, he wrote fourteen popular history books, most notably The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965), The Roman Republic (1966) and The Roman Empire (1967). Never entirely lacking wit and humor, towards the end of his life Asimov published a series of collections of limericks, mostly written by himself, starting with Lecherous Limericks, which appeared in 1975. Limericks: Too Gross, whose title displays Asimov's love of puns, contains 144 limericks by Asimov and an equal number by John Ciardi. Asimov's Treasury of Humor is both a working joke book and a treatise propounding his views on humor theory. According to Asimov, the most essential element of humor is an abrupt change in point of view, one that suddenly shifts focus from the important to the trivial, or from the sublime to the ridiculous. Particularly in his later years, Asimov to some extent cultivated an image of himself as an amiable lecher. In 1971, as a response to the popularity of sexual guidebooks such as The Sensuous Woman (by "J") and The Sensuous Man (by "M"), Asimov published The Sensuous Dirty Old Man under the byline "Dr. 'A'", but with his full name prominently displayed on the cover. Asimov published two volumes of autobiography: In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980). A third autobiography, I. Asimov: A Memoir, was published in April 1994. The epilogue was written by his widow Janet Asimov shortly after his death. It's Been a Good Life (2002), edited by Janet, is a condensed version of his three autobiographies.
Literary themes
Much of Asimov's fiction dealt with themes of paternalism. His first robot story, "Robbie", concerned a robotic nanny. As the robots grew more sophisticated, their interventions became more wide-reaching and subtle. In "Evidence", a robot masquerading as a human successfully runs for elective office. In "The Evitable Conflict", the robots run humanity from behind the scenes, acting as nannies to the whole species. Later, in Robots and Empire, a robot develops what he calls the Zeroth Law of Robotics, which states that "A robot may not injure humanity, nor, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm". He also decides that robotic presence is stifling humanity's freedom, and that the best course of action is for the robots to phase themselves out. A non-robot novel, The End of Eternity, features a similar conflict and resolution. In The Foundation Series (which did not originally have robots), a scientist implements a semi-secret plan to create a perfect society over the course of 1000 years. This series has its version of Platonic guardians, called the Second Foundation, to perfect and protect the plan. When Asimov stopped writing the series in the 1950s, the Second Foundation was depicted as benign protectors of humanity. When he revisited the series in the 1980s, he made the paternalistic themes even more explicit. Foundation's Edge introduced the planet Gaia, obviously based on the Gaia hypothesis. Every animal, plant, and mineral on Gaia participated in a shared consciousness, forming a single super-mind working together for the greater good. In Foundation and Earth, the protagonist must decide whether or not to allow the development of Galaxia, a larger version of Gaia, encompassing the entire galaxy. Foundation and Earth introduces robots to the Foundation universe. Two of Asimov's last novels, Prelude to Foundation and Forward the Foundation, explore their behavior in fuller detail. The robots are depicted as covert operatives, acting for the benefit of humanity. Another frequent theme, perhaps the reverse of paternalism, is social oppression. The Currents of Space takes place on a planet where a unique plant fiber is grown; the agricultural workers there are exploited by the aristocrats of a nearby planet. In The Stars, Like Dust, the hero helps a planet that is oppressed by an arrogant interplanetary empire, the Tyranni. Often the victims of oppression are either Earth people (as opposed to colonists on other planets) or robots. In "The Bicentennial Man", a robot fights prejudice to be accepted as a human. In The Caves of Steel, the people of Earth resent the wealthier "Spacers" and in turn treat robots (associated with the Spacers) in ways reminiscent of how whites treated blacks, such as addressing robots as "boy". Pebble in the Sky shows an analogous situation: the Galactic Empire rules Earth and its people use such terms as "Earthie-squaw", but Earth is a theocratic dictatorship that enforces euthanasia of anyone older than sixty. One hero is Bel Arvardan, an upper-class Galactic archeologist who must overcome his prejudices. The other is Joseph Schwartz, a 62-year-old twentieth-century American who had emigrated from Europe, where his people were persecuted (he is quite possibly Jewish), and is accidentally transported forward in time to Arvardan's period. He must decide whether to help a downtrodden society that thinks he should be dead. Yet another frequent theme in Asimov is rational thought. He invented the science-fiction mystery with the novel The Caves of Steel and the stories in Asimov's Mysteries, usually playing fair with the reader by introducing early in the story any science or technology involved in the solution. Later, he produced non-SF mysteries, including the novel Murder at the ABA (1976) and the "Black Widowers" short stories, in which he followed the same rule. In his fiction, important scenes are often essentially debates, with the more rational, humane—or persuasive—side winning.
Criticisms
One of the most common impressions of Asimov's fiction work is that his writing style is extremely unornamental. In 1980, SF scholar James Gunn wrote of I, Robot that :Except for two stories—"Liar!" and "Evidence"—they are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and the style is, at best, transparent. [...] The robot stories—and, as a matter of fact, almost all Asimov fiction—play themselves on a relatively bare stage. This description applies well to a large proportion of Asimov's fiction, including that written after 1980. Gunn observes that there are places where Asimov's style rises to the demands of the situation; he cites the climax of "Liar!" as an example. One should not overlook the sharply drawn characters which occur at key junctures of his storylines: in addition to Susan Calvin in "Liar!" and "Evidence", we find Arkady Darell in Second Foundation, Elijah Baley in The Caves of Steel and Hari Seldon in the Foundation prequels. (In Forward the Foundation, Seldon becomes a partial mirror of Asimov himself.) Asimov was also criticised for the lack of sex and aliens in his science fiction. Asimov once explained that his reluctance to write about aliens came from an incident early in his career when Astoundings editor John Campbell rejected one of his early science fiction stories because the alien characters were portrayed as superior to the humans. He decided that, rather than write weak alien characters, he would not write about aliens at all. Nevertheless, in response to these criticisms he wrote The Gods Themselves, which contains aliens, sex, and alien sex. Asimov said that of all his writings, he was most proud of the middle section of The Gods Themselves. Others have criticised him for a lack of strong female characters in his early work. In his autobiographical writings, he acknowledges this, and responds by pointing to inexperience. His later novels, written with more female characters but in essentially the same prose style as his early SF stories, brought this matter to a wider audience. For example, the 25 August 1985 Washington Posts "Book World" section reports of Robots and Empire as follows: :In 1940, Asimov's humans were stripped-down masculine portraits of Americans from 1940, and they still are. His robots were tin cans with speedlines like an old Studebaker, and still are; the Robot tales depended on an increasingly unworkable distinction between movable and unmovable artificial intelligences, and still do. In the Asimov universe, because it was conceived a long time ago, and because its author abhors confusion, there are no computers whose impact is worth noting, no social complexities, no genetic engineering, aliens, arcologies, multiverses, clones, sin or sex; his heroes (in this case R. Daneel Olivaw, whom we first met as the robot protagonist of The Caves of Steel and its sequels) feel no pressure of information, raw or cooked, as the simplest of us do today; they suffer no deformation from the winds of the Asimov future, because it is so deeply and strikingly orderly. A considerable portion of such criticism boils down to the charge that Asimov's works are not cyberpunk, or are simply dated. In fact, some details of Asimov's imaginary future technology as he described more than fifty years ago have not aged well. He has, for example, described powerful robots and computers from the distant future as still using punch cards or punch tape and engineers using slide rules. His stories also have occasional internal contradictions. Some stories state, for instance, that robots cannot lie, while in others robots lie in order to obey the Three Laws of Robotics (i.e., they are ordered to lie or must lie to protect a human being). Other than the books by Gunn and Patrouch, there is a relative dearth of "literary" criticism on Asimov (particularly when compared to the sheer volume of his output). Cowart and Wymer's Dictionary of Literary Biography (1981) gives a possible reason: :His words do not easily lend themselves to traditional literary criticism because he has the habit of centering his fiction on plot and clearly stating to his reader, in rather direct terms, what is happening in his stories and why it is happening. In fact, most of the dialogue in an Asimov story, and particularly in the [Foundation] trilogy, is devoted to such exposition. Stories that clearly state what they mean in unambiguous language are the most difficult for a scholar to deal with because there is little to be interpreted. In fairness, Gunn and Patrouch's respective studies of Asimov both take the stand that a clear, direct prose style is still a style. Gunn's 1982 book goes into considerable depth commenting upon each of Asimov's novels published to that date. He does not praise all of Asimov's fiction (and nor does Patrouch), but he does call some passages in The Caves of Steel "reminiscent of Proust". When discussing how that novel depicts night falling over futuristic New York City, Gunn says that Asimov's prose "need not be ashamed anywhere in literary society". Although he prided himself on an unornamented prose style, he also enjoyed giving his longer stories complicated narrative structures, often by arranging chapters in non-chronological ways. Some readers have been put off by this, complaining that the nonlinearity is not worth the trouble and adversely impacts the clarity of the story. For example, the first third of The Gods Themselves begins with Chapter 6, then backtracks to fill in earlier material [http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/Asimov/Books/Book121.html]. (In fairness, one should note that John Campbell advised Asimov to begin his stories as late in the plot as possible. This tidbit of advice helped Asimov create "Reason," one of the early Robot stories. See In Memory Yet Green for details of that time period.) Asimov's tendency to contort his timelines is perhaps most apparent in his later novel Nemesis, in which one group of characters live in the "present" and another group starts in the "past", beginning fifteen years earlier and gradually moving toward the time period of the first group. In 2002, Donald Palumbo, an English professor at East Carolina University published Chaos Theory, Asimov’s Foundations and Robots, and Herbert’s Dune: The Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science Fiction. This includes a review of Asimov's narrative structures that compares them with the scientific concepts of fractals and chaos. Palumbo finds that a fascination with the Foundation and Robot metaseries remains, and he determines that the purposeful complexities of the narrative build unusual symmetric and recursive structures to be perceived by the mind's eye. This volume contains some of the most scholarly and in-depth criticism of Asimov to date. John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of Asimov's written output, once observed, :It has been pointed out that most sf writers since the 1950s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or deliberately avoiding anything like his style. [http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/Asimov/NonAsimov/White.html] In the Hugo Award-winning novella, "Gold", Asimov describes an author clearly based on himself who has one of his books (The Gods Themselves) adapted into a "compu-drama", essentially photo-realistic computer animation. The director criticizes the fictionalized Asimov ("Gregory Laborian") for having an extremely non-visual style making it difficult to adapt his work, and the author explains that he relies on ideas and dialogue rather than description to get his points across. Ironically, the story mimics the same style the author in it uses to describe his work, and one can see it as Asimov's reply to his critics.
Quotations

- "If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
- "I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending."
- "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers."
- "Night was a wonderful time in Brooklyn in the 1930s. Air conditioning was unknown except in movie houses, and so was television. There was nothing to keep one in the house. Furthermore, few people owned automobiles, so there was nothing to carry one away. That left the streets and the stoops. The very fullness served as an inhibition to crime."
- "What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for", September 20, 1973, Yours, Isaac Asimov, page 329.
- "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." Salvor Hardin, a character in Foundation.
Selected bibliography
In addition, see the complete bibliography. Asimov aspired to write 500 books but did not quite reach that total; he wrote over 463 titles. If all titles, charts, and edited collections are counted, there are currently 509 items in his complete bibliography. Asimov could have written an Opus 400, which would have been a celebration of his 400th title; the bibliography lists only up to his commemorative Opus 300.
Science fiction

"Greater Foundation" series
The first three of these series of novels were published as independent stories. Later in life, Asimov synthesized them into a single coherent 'history' that appeared in the extention of the Foundation series. The Robot series:
- The Caves of Steel (1954), ISBN 0553293400 (first Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
- The Naked Sun (1957), ISBN 0553293397 (second Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
- The Robots of Dawn (1983), ISBN 0553299492 (third Elijah Baley SF-crime novel)
- Robots and Empire (1985) (sequel to the Elijah Baley trilogy)
- The Positronic Man (1993) (with Robert Silverberg, a novel based on Asimov's earlier short story "The Bicentennial Man") Galactic Empire series:
- Pebble in the Sky (1950)
- The Stars, Like Dust (1951)
- The Currents of Space (1952) Original Foundation trilogy:
- Foundation (1951), ISBN 0553293354
- Foundation and Empire (1952), ISBN 0553293370
- Second Foundation (1953), ISBN 0553293362 Extended Foundation series:
- Foundation's Edge (1982), ISBN 0553293389
- Foundation and Earth (1986), ISBN 0553587579
- Prelude to Foundation (1988), ISBN 0553278398
- Forward the Foundation (1993), ISBN 0385247931 (hardcover), ISBN 0553404881 (paperback)
Novels not part of a series

- The End of Eternity (1955)
- Fantastic Voyage (1966) (a novelization of the movie featuring a team of American scientists traveling within a human body)
- The Gods Themselves (1972)
- Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987) (not a sequel to the first Fantastic Voyage, but an independent story)
- Nemesis (1989)
- Nightfall (1990) (with Robert Silverberg, a novel based on the earlier short story)
- The Ugly Little Boy (1992) (with Robert Silverberg, a novel based on an earlier short story) (While primarily independent, some of these novels have very minor connections to the Foundation series.)
Short story collections
Also see List of short stories by Isaac Asimov
- I, Robot (1950), ISBN 0553294385
- The Martian Way and Other Stories (1955)
- Earth Is Room Enough (1957)
- Nine Tomorrows (1959)
- The Rest of the Robots (1964)
- Nightfall and Other Stories (1969)
- The Early Asimov (1972)
- The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973)
- Buy Jupiter and Other Stories (1975)
- The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (1976)
- The Complete Robot (1982)
- The Winds of Change and Other Stories (1983)
- Robot Dreams (1986)
- Azazel (1988)
- Gold (1990)
- Robot Visions (1990) ISBN 0-451-45064-7
- Magic (1995)
Mysteries

Novels

- The Death Dealers (1958) (later republished as A Whiff of Death)
- Murder at the ABA (1976) (also published as Authorized Murder)
Short story collections (Black Widowers and others)

- Asimov's Mysteries (1968)
- Tales of the Black Widowers (1974)
- More Tales of the Black Widowers (1976)
- Casebook of the Black Widowers (1980)
- Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984)
- The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov (1986)
- Puzzles of the Black Widowers (1990)
- Return of the Black Widowers (2003) contains stories uncollected at the time of Asimov's death, in addition to contributions by Charles Ardai and Harlan Ellison
Nonfiction

Popular science

- Adding a Dimension (1964)
- Asimov on Numbers (1959)
- Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery (1989, second edition extends to 1993)
- Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991)
- The Chemicals of Life (1954)
- The Clock We Live On (1959)
- The Collapsing Universe (1977) ISBN 0-671-81738-8
- The Earth (2004, revised by Richard Hantula)
- Exploring the Earth and the Cosmos (1982)
- The Human Brain (1964)
- Inside the Atom (1956)
- Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space (1991)
- The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1965)
- Jupiter (2004, revised by Richard Hantula)
- Life and Energy (1962)
-

1920

1920 (MCMXX) is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar)

Events

January

- January 7 - Forces of Russian White admiral Kolchak surrender in Krasnoyarsk.
- January 9 - Britain announces it will build 1,000,000 homes for war veterans. The promise will never be fulfilled in full.
- January 9 - Thousands of onlookers watch as "The Human Fly" George Polley, climbs the New York Woolworth Building. He has reached the 30th floor when a policeman arrests him for climbing without a permit
- January 10 - League of Nations holds its first meeting and ratifies the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I.
- January 15 - Prohibition goes into effect in the United States with the Eighteenth Amendment coming into effect.
- January 16 - Allies demand that the Netherlands extradite the German Kaiser, who has fled there.
- January 19 - The United States Senate votes against joining the League of Nations.
- January 22 - The Australian Country Party is officially formed.
- January 23 - The Netherlands refuses to extradite the German Kaiser.
- January 28 - The Spanish legion is founded and stationed in North Africa to fight rebels in Morocco.
- January 28 - Turkey gives up the Ottoman Empire and all non-Turkish areas.

February

- February 1 - The Royal Canadian Mounted Police begin operations.
- February 2 - Estonia's independence is recognised.
- February 2 - France occupies Memel.
- February 9 - League of Nations gives Spitzbergen to Norway.
- February 10 - Jozef Haller de Hallenburg performs symbolic engagement of Poland with the sea, celebrating restitution of Polish access to open sea.
- February 17 - Woman named Anna Anderson tries to commit suicide in Berlin and is taken to mental hospital, where she claims she is Anastasia.
- February 14 - The League of Women Voters is founded in Chicago, Illinois.
- February 22 - In Emeryville, California, the first dog racing track to employ an imitation rabbit opens.
- February 24 - Adolf Hitler presents his national socialist program in Munich.

March

- March - World's first peaceful establishment of a social democratic government takes place in Sweden. Hjalmar Branting takes over when Nils Edén resigns.
- March 1 - Hungarian Admiral and statesman Miklós Horthy becomes the Regent of Hungary
- March 1 - The United States Railroad Administration returns control of American railroads to its constituent railroad companies.
- March 13-March 17 - Wolfgang Kapp fails in his coup attempt in Germany due to public resistance and a general strike.
- March 15 ? Red Army of Ruhr, communist army 60.000 men strong, formed
- March 19 - US Congress refuses to ratify Versailles Treaty.
- March 23 - Admiral Horthy declares that Hungary is a monarchy without anyone on the throne.
- March 26 - German government asks France for permission to use its own troops against rebellious Ruhr Red Army in the French-occupied area.
- March 26 - The Black and Tans special constables arrive in Ireland
- March 29 - Sir William Robertson, who enlisted in 1877, becomes a field marshal in the British Army, the first man to rise to this rank from private
- March 31 - Government of Ireland Act 1920 is presented in British parliament.

April-May

- April 2 - German army marches to Ruhr to fight Red Ruhr Army.
- April 4 - Jerusalem pogrom of April, 1920 ? Violence between Arabic and Jewish resident in Jerusalem ? governor declares the state of siege
- April 6 - French troops occupy Frankfurt.
- April 6 - The short-lived Far Eastern Republic declared in eastern Siberia
- April 11 - Mexican Revolution - Alvaro Obregon flees from Mexico City during a trial intended to ruin his reputation - he flees to Guerrero where he joins Fortunato Maycotte
- April 19 - Germany and Bolshevist Russia agree to the exchange of prisoners of war.
- April 20 - Alvaro Obregon announces in Chilpancingo that he intends to fight against the rule of Venustiano Carranza
- April 23 - National council in Turkey denounces the government of sultan Mehmed VI and announces a temporary constitution.
- April 24 - Polish-Soviet War: Polish and Ukrainian troops attack Soviet army occupying Ukraine.
- May 2 - The first game of the Negro National League baseball is played in Indianapolis, Indiana.
- May 7 - Polish-Soviet War: Polish troops occupy Kyiv. Ukrainian government returns to the city.
- May 7 - Venustiano Carranza leaves Mexico City in a large train
- May 9 - Alvaro Obregon's troops enter Mexico City
- May 15 - Maria Bochkareva executed in Soviet Union
- May 16 - Referendum in Switzerland is favorable to joining League of Nations.
- May 16 - In Rome, Pope Benedict XV canonizes Joan of Arc as a saint.
- May 17 - French and Belgian troops leave the cities they have occupied in Germany.
- May 17 - First flight of KLM, Dutch air company, from Amsterdam to London.
- May 20 - Venustiano Carranza arrives in San Antonio Tlaxcalantongo. Troops of Rodolfo Herrero attack him at night and shoot him
- May 24 - Venustiano Carranza is buried in Mexico City - all of his mourning allies are arrested. Adolfo de la Huerta is elected provisional president
- May 24 - French president Paul Deschanel falls out of a train and is later found wandering along the railroad track, wearing pajamas.
- May 27 - Thomas Masaryk becomes president of Czechoslovakia.
- May 29 - Great Horncastle flood. 20 people killed.

June-July

- June 4 - Treaty of Trianon, Treaty of Peace between The Allied and Hungary.
- June 12 - Polish-Soviet War: Red Army retakes Kyiv.
- June 13 - The United States Postal Service rules that children may not be sent via parcel post
- June 15 - New border treaty between Germany and Denmark gives northern Schleswig to Denmark.
- June 22 - Greece attacks Turkish troops.
- July 1 - Germany declares its neutrality in the war between Poland and Soviet Russia
- July 2 - Polish-Soviet War: Red Army continues offensive into Poland.
- July 10 - Arthur Meighen becomes Canada's ninth prime minister.
- July 12 - Bolshevist Russia recognizes independent Lithuania.
- July 13 - London County Council bars foreigners from council jobs.
- July 14 - France declares that Faisal I of Syria is deposed and occupies Damascus and Aleppo
- July 17 - Republic of Mirdite proclaimed near Albanian-Serbian border with Yugoslav support
- July 22 - Polish-Soviet War: Poland sues for peace with Bolshevist Russia.
- July 25 - First transatlantic two-way radio broadcast.
- July 26 - Pancho Villa takes over Sabina and contacts de la Huerta to offer his conditional surrender. He signs his surrender in July 28
- July 29 - The United States Bureau of Reclamation begins contruction of the Link River Dam as part of the Klamath Reclamation Project.

August-September

- August 2 - British parliament passes bill to restore order in Ireland, suspending jury trials.
- August 3 - Catholics riot in Belfast.
- August 10 - Ottoman sultan Mehmed VI's representatives signs the Treaty of Sevres.
- August 11 - Bolshevik Russia recognizes independent Estonia and Latvia.
- August 13 - August 25 - Polish-Soviet War: The Red Army is defeated in the Battle of Warsaw.
- August 15 - Town Hall of Templemore, Ireland, is burned down during the riots.
- August 18 - 19th Amendment to US constitution is passed, guaranteeing women's suffrage.
- 19 August-25 August - Second Silesian Uprising, the Poles in Upper Silesia rise against the Germans
- August 20 - The first commercial radio station in the United States, 8MK (WWJ), begins operations in Detroit, Michigan.
- September 4 - La Tercio de Extranjenos, the "Regiment of Foreigners" (modern-day Spanish Legion) inaugurated in Spain
- September 5 - Presidential elections begin in Mexico
- September 8 - Gabriele D'Annunzio declares Fiume a free state.
- September 16 - The Wall Street bombing: a bomb in a horse wagon explodes in front of the J.P.Morgan building in New York City - 39 dead, 400 injured
- September 20 - The first soldier joins the Spanish Legion.
- September 22 - Flying Squad formed in London Metropolitan Police.
- September 29 - First domestic radio sets come to stores in USA – Westinghouse radio costs $10.
- September 29 - Adolf Hitler's makes first public political speech, in Austria.

October-November

- October 9 - Polish troops take Vilnius
- October 10 - In the Carinthian Plebiscite a large part of Carinthia Province votes to become part of Austria rather than of the Yugoslavia.
- October 12 - Polish-Soviet War After Polish army captures Tarnopol, Dubno, Minsk, and Dryssa, the ceasefire is enforced.
- October 18 - Thousands of unemployed demonstrate in London ? 50 injured
- October 26 - Alvaro Obregon is announced elected president of Mexico
- October 27 - League of Nations moves its headquarters to Geneve, Switzerland
- November 2 - Warren G. Harding defeats James M. Cox in the U.S. presidential election, the first national U.S. election in which women have the right to vote.
- November 2 - In the United States, KDKA AM of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (owned by Westinghouse) starts broadcasting as a commercial radio station. The first broadcast was the results of the U.S. presidential election, 1920.
- November 11 - Unknown Soldier buried in Westminster Abbey.
- November 15 - In Geneva, the first assembly of the League of Nations is held.
- November 16 - Queensland and Northen Territory Aviation Services (Qantas) is founded by Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinniss.
- November 17 - Council of League of Nations accepts the constitution of Danzig(Gdansk) free state.
- November 21 - Bloody Sunday - British forces open fire on spectators and players during a Football match in Dublin's Croke Park, following the assassinations of 12 British agents.
- November 28 - The Third Cork Brigade Flying Column under Gen. Tom Barry successfully ambush two lorries of British soldiers at Kilmichael ,Co.Cork.

December

- December 1 - Álvaro Obregón becomes president of Mexico.
- December 5 - Referendum in Greece is favorable to reinstatement of monarchy.
- December 11 - Martial law in Ireland.
- December 16 - Finland joins the League of Nations.
- December 16 - 8.6 Richter scale Earthquake causes landslide in Gansu Province, China - 180.000 dead.
- December 23 - United Kingdom and France ratify the border between French-held Syria and British-held Palestine.
- December 25 - Foundation of The Rosicrucian Fellowship's Spiritual Healing Temple "The Ecclesia" at Mount Ecclesia, Oceanside, California (USA).

Undated

- Number of US Americans move to Paris to escape the Prohibition
- France prohibits selling of contraceptives.
- Roman Ungern von Sternberg conquers Urga and declares himself as a ruler of Mongolia.
- Kurd rebellion in Turkey begins.
- Johnny Torrio invites Al Capone to Chicago, Illinois from New York City, New York.
- Bricks of wine are widely sold throughout U.S.

Births

January

- January 1 - Virgilio Savona, Italian singer and songwriter (Quartetto Cetra)
- January 2 - Isaac Asimov, Russian-born author (d. 1992)
- January 3 - Renato Carosone, Italian musician and singer (d. 2001)
- January 5 - Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Italian pianist (d. 1995)
- January 6 - Sun Myung Moon, Korean evangelist
- January 6 - John Maynard Smith, English biologist (d. 2004)
- January 6 - Early Wynn, baseball player (d. 1999)
- January 12 - Bill Reid, Canadian artist (d. 1998)
- January 19 - Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Peruvian United Nations Secretary General
- January 20 - Federico Fellini, Italian film director (d. 1993)
- January 20 - DeForest Kelley, American actor (d. 1999)
- January 20 - John O'Connor, American Catholic cardinal
- January 23 - Gottfried Böhm, German architect
- January 30 - Delbert Mann, American television and film director

February-March

- February 7 - An Wang, Chinese-born computer pioneer (d. 1990)
- February 11 - Farouk I, King of Egypt (d. 1965)
- February 11 - Billy Halop, American actor (d. 1976)
- February 11 - Paul Peter Piech, American artist (d. 1996)
- February 12 - William Roscoe Estep, American Baptist historian (d. 2000)
- February 17 - Ivo Caprino, Norwegian film director (d. 2001)
- February 18 - Bill Cullen, American game show host (d. 1990)
- February 18 - Eddie Slovik, U.S. Army private (d. 1945)
- February 26 - Tony Randall, American actor (d. 2004)
- February 29 - Howard Nemerov, American poet (d. 1991)
- March 3 - James Doohan, Canadian-born actor (d. 2005)
- March 3 - Ronald Searle, British cartoonist
- March 10 - Boris Vian , French writer, poet, singer and musician
- March 11 - Nicolaas Bloembergen, Dutch physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
- March 14 - Hank Ketcham, American cartoonist (d. 2001)
- March 15 - Lawrence Sanders, American novelist (d. 1998)
- March 15 - E. Donnall Thomas, American physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- March 16 - Leo McKern, Australian actor (d. 2002)
- March 17 - Mujibur Rahman, Prime Minister of Bangladesh (d. 1975)
- March 19 - Kjell Aukrust, Norwegian poet and artist (d. 2002)
- March 20 - Pamela Harriman, English-born U.S. Ambassador to France (d. 1997)
- March 22 Werner Klemperer, German actor (d. 2000)
- March 25 - Patrick Troughton, British actor (d. 1987)
- March 25 - Arthur Wint, Jamaican runner (d. 1992)

April

- April 1 - Toshirô Mifune, Japanese actor (d. 1997)
- April 2 - Jack Webb, American actor, director, and producer (d. 1982)
- April 5 - Arthur Hailey, American writer
- April 6 - Edmond H. Fischer, Swiss-American biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- April 7 - Ravi Shankar, Indian sitar player
- April 11 - Peter O'Donnell, British cartoonist and writer
- April 15 - Thomas Stephen Szasz, Hungarian-born psychiatrist and writer
- April 13 - Liam Cosgrave, President of Ireland
- April 27 - Guido Cantelli, Italian conductor (d. 1956)
- April 29 - Harold Shapero, American composer

May

- May 2 - Jean-Marie Auberson, Swiss conductor (d. 2004)
- May 6 - Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, first Prime Minister of Fiji and President of Fiji (d. 2004)
- May 9 - Richard Adams, English author
- May 18 - Pope John Paul II (d. 2005)
- May 18 - Lucia Mannucci, Italian singer (Quartetto Cetra)
- May 23 - Helen O'Connell, American singer (d. 1993)
- May 26 - Peggy Lee, American singer (d. 2002)
- May 28 - Gene Levitt, American television writer, producer, and director (d. 1999)
- May 29 - John Harsanyi, Hungarian-born economist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2000)
- May 30 - Franklin Schaffner, American film and television director (d. 1989)

June-July

- June 2 - Tex Schramm, American football team president and general manager (d. 2003)
- June 12 - Dave Berg, American cartoonist (d. 2002)
- June 12 - Jim Siedow, American actor (d. 2003)
- June 16 - José López Portillo, President of Mexico (d. 2004)
- June 17 - François Jacob, French biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- June 25 - Ozan Marsh, American pianist
- July 10 - David Brinkley, American television reporter (d. 2003)
- July 10 - Owen Chamberlain, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
- July 17 - Juan Antonio Samaranch, Spanish International Olympic Committee president
- July 21 - Isaac Stern, Ukrainian-born violinist (d. 2001)
- July 24 - Bella Abzug, American politician (d. 1998)
- July 25 - Rosalind Franklin, British crystallographer (d.1958)

August-December

- August 8 - Leo Chiosso, Italian poet
- August 16 - Charles Bukowski, American writer (d. 1994)
- August 18 - Bob Kennedy, baseball player and manager (d. 2005)
- August 21 - Christopher Robin Milne, English author and bookseller (d. 1996)
- August 22 - Ray Bradbury, American writer
- August 29 - Charlie Parker, American jazz saxophonist and composer (d. 1955)
- September 10 - Fabio Taglioni, Italian motorcycle engineer (d. 2001)
- September 14 - Mario Benedetti, Uruguayan writer
- September 14 - Lawrence Klein, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
- September 22 - William H. Riker, American political scientist (d. 1993)
- September 29 - Peter D. Mitchell, English chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
- October 1 - Charles Daudelin, Canadian sculptor (d. 2001)
- October 1 - Walter Matthau, American actor (d. 2000)
- October 6 - Pietro Consagra, Italian sculptor (d. 2005)
- October 8 - Frank Herbert, American author (d. 1986)
- October 9 - Jens Bjørneboe, Norwegian author (d. 1976)
- October 15 - Mario Puzo, American author (d. 1999)
- October 29 - Baruj Benacerraf, Venezuelan-born immunologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- October 31 - Fritz Walter, German football player (d. 2002)
- November 5 - Douglass North, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate
- November 21 - Stan Musial, baseball player
- November 23 - Paul Celan, Romanian-born poet (d. 1970)
- November 25 - Tuanku Syed Putra ibni Almarhum Syed Hassan Jamalullail, King of Malaysia (d. 2000)
- November 25 - Ricardo Montalban, Mexican actor
- November 25 - Noel Neill, American actress
- November 27 - Abe Lenstra, Dutch football player (d. 1985)
- December 6 - Dave Brubeck, American jazz pianist and composer
- December 6 - George Porter, English chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2002)
- December 9 - Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, President of the Italian Republic
- December 24 - Evgeniya Rudneva, Russian World War II heroine (d. 1944)
- December 30 - Jack Lord, American actor (d. 1998)

Date unknown

- Patrick Campbell Rodger, Scottish Anglican bishop (d. 2002)

Deaths

- January 2 - Paul Adam, French writer (b. 1862)
- January 3 - Zygmunt Janiszewski, Polish mathematician (b. 1888)
- January 4 - Benito Pérez Galdós, Spanish novelist (b. 1843)
- January 6 - Hieronymus Georg Zeuthen, Danish mathematician (b. 1839)
- January 7 - Edmund Barton, Prime Minister of Australia (b. 1849)
- January 18 - Giovanni Capurro, Italian poet (b. 1825)
- January 24 - William Percy French, Irish songwriter and entertainer (b. 1854)
- January 24 - Amedeo Modigliani, Italian painter and sculptor (tuberculosis) (b. 1884)
- January 24 - William Plunket, 5th Baron Plunket, British diplomat and administrator (b. 1864)
- January 26 - Jeanne Hébuterne, French artist, model, and common-law wife of Amedeo Modigliani (suicide) (b. 1898)
- February 2 - Field E. Kindley, American World War I aviator (b. 1896)
- February 3 - Frank Brown, Governor of Maryland (b. 1846)
- February 6 - Augustus F. Goodridge, Canadian merchant and politician (b. 1839)
- February 7 - Aleksandr Kolchak, Russian naval commander (b. 1874)
- February 15 - Joseph Burton Sumner, founder of Sumner, Mississippi (b. 1837)
- February 20 - Joseph J. Fern, Mayor of Honolulu (b. 1872)
- February 20 - Robert Peary, American Arctic explorer (b. 1856)
- February 27 - William Sherman Jennings, Governor of Florida (b. 1863)
- March 1 - John H. Bankhead, U.S. Senator from Alabama (b. 1842)
- March 1 - William A. Stone, Governor of Pennsylvania (b. 1846)
- March 1 - Joseph Trumpeldor, Russian Zionist (b. 1880)
- March 4 - Roswell P. Bishop, U.S. Congressman from Michigan (b. 1843)
- March 11 - Julio Garavito Armero, Colombian astronomer (b. 1865)
- March 13 - Charles Lapworth, English geologist (b. 1842)
- March 26 - William Chester Minor, American surgeon (b. 1834)
- March 26 - Mary Augusta Ward, Tasmanian novelist (b. 1851)
- March 31 - Paul Bachmann, German mathematician (b. 1837)
- March 31 - Edwin Warfield, Governor of Maryland (b. 1848)
- April 8 - John Brashear, American astronomer (b. 1840)
- April 8 - Charles Tomlinson Griffes, American composer (b. 1884)
- April 9 - Moritz Cantor, German historian of mathematics (b. 1829)
- April 21 - Maria L. Sanford, American educator (b. 1836)
- April 26 - Srinivasa Ramanujan, Indian mathematician (b. 1887)
- May 1 - Princess Margaret of Connaught, Crown Princess of Sweden (b. 1882)
- May 9 - Agnes Macdonald, wife of John A. Macdonald, Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1836
- May 11 - James Colosimo, Italian-born gangster (b. 1877)
- May 11 - William Dean Howells, American writer (b.