by Isaac Asimov

Born in Russia in 1920, Isaac Asimov moved to New York at the age of three. A self-proclaimed child prodigy, he began to write science fiction as a teenager and by 1950 had become a successful writer, published mostly by Doubleday. His repertoire by then included eight interconnected science fiction magazine stories. In 1951 he organized this 200,000- word beginning into a science fiction trilogy- which the Doubleday publishing company promptly rejected, as did the house of Little, Brown. An obscure press, Gnome, published the three books-Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). Not until approached by a Portuguese publisher for rights to these books did Doubleday acquire the trilogy and republish it in 1961. The series marked Asimov as one of the premier science fiction writers of this century. Eventually the stories of the Foundation were expanded to three additional volumes: Foundation's Edge (1982), Foundation and Earth (1986), and Forward...