Background
Robert Sheckley was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in New Jersey.
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Robert Sheckley was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in New Jersey.
He was a fair scholar, though it was noted that he never did what I was capable of. Instead he read books, played in a dance band, having mastered enough at the guitar, and dreamed of becoming a writer. He dated, had my heart broken, recovered. He had very few problems. But something must have been amiss because, at the age of fifteen or so, he ran away from home, went to New York City and found a job in a photography lab. He telephoned his parents to let them know he was all right. They asked to see him. He agreed, and they asked him to stay home until he was seventeen and had graduated high school, he has never ran away again.
He went into the U.S. army after high school and served in Korea. After discharge he attended New York University, graduating with an arts degree. He began to sell stories to all the science-fiction magazines soon after his graduation, producing several hundred stories over the next several years.
At the beginning of the 50th years Sheckley started writing the first stories. A veteran science fiction writer, Bob began his career in New York City during what is often referred to as the classic period of science fiction writing. His work was published in "Galaxy" and for other pulp magazines that paid up to four cents per word for each story.
The 1950s saw the publication of Sheckley's first four books: short story collections Untouched by Human Hands (1954), Citizen in Space (1955), and Pilgrimage to Earth (1957), and a novel, Immortality, Inc. (first published as a serial in Galaxy, 1958). In the 1990s Sheckley wrote a series of three mystery novels featuring detective Hob Draconian, as well as novels set in the worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Alien.
Sheckley was a prolific and versatile writer. He was best known for his numerous (several hundreds) short stories, which he published in book form as well as individually. His works include not only original short stories and novels, but also TV series episodes (Captain Video and His Video Rangers), novelizations of works by others (Babylon 5: A Call to Arms, after the film), shared universe stories, and collaborations with other writers.
in 1951 he married for the first time, to Barbara Scadron. The couple had one son, Jason.Sheckley and Scadron divorced in 1956. The writer married journalist Ziva Kwitney in 1957. The newly married couple lived in Greenwich Village. Their daughter, Alisa Kwitney, born in 1964, would herself become a successful writer.He and Kwitney divorced in 1972 and the same year Sheckley married Abby Schulman, whom he had met in Ibiza. The couple had two children, Anya and Jed. The couple separated while living in London.He married Gail Dana of Portland in 1990.