Being a journalist or writer doesn't mean knowing how to write, it's an art that becomes such only when you feel a strange discomfort in front of a blank page.
Then when you prefer to write rather than do anything else, everything becomes a work that will always remain unfinished. My memory runs through illustrious names of writers who have also participated in the history of journalism, but there is one who deserves to be remembered, a man who usually began writing in the early hours of dawn and often finished late at night, beating the keys at a rate of ninety words per minute.
He was called Isaac Asimov. Writer of hundreds of books and journalist of thousands of articles for science, mathematics and science fiction newspapers and magazines, who doesn't remember him?! In his New York studio – with his three electric cars – he loved to go from one subject to another and without any difficulty resumed at any time. Writer Theodore Sturgeon wrote about him on New York Times: "Asimov's role in the literary environment is unprecedented, because not only is he not admired for his science fiction works, but he is appreciated as a journalist of at least twenty different disciplines". In reality he was an outgoing person, who knew how to converse with anyone and who devoted more time to the people he met than was required of him.
He was born in 1920 in Petrovici 300 kilometers west of Moscow. He will soon follow his father, who emigrated to America, and exactly to Brooklyn, where he had opened a series of shops and sweets and sweets. Isaac helped his father in the shop, but all of his free time was spent in the library. “I made my first application to join a library when I was only six years old, but I couldn't take home more than two books at a time, so I only took home the biggest volumes”. At the age of nine he was struck by reading the science fiction magazine Science Wonder Stories. At the age of eleven he began to write his first articles, at seventeen he began to collaborate with the editorial staff of the Astounding Science Fiction. Enrolled in the faculty of medicine, he was however not admitted, because he was judged immature for the type of course. Although sorry, he said "all in all I feel relieved, I never wanted to be a doctor", and so he enrolled in chemistry. But his passion was literature, to the point of spending the nights and every weekend writing articles for some newspapers. At the same time he worked as a teacher until in 1958 he decided to devote himself entirely to writing. He produced countless science and fiction books, but also critical works on classics, such as Byron or Shakespeare and even the Bible. In addition, he writes children's stories and series of poems on a vaguely erotic subject.
In 1977 he published his first magazine Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
In 1972, he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer with the urgent need for surgery. His reaction was to say "I'm only 52, if I died now I'd look like a fool, because I'd leave too many things half done". And while he awaits the operation, he writes a short whodunit story.
His activity ends on April 6, 1992, when he dies of cardiac arrest, for having contracted the HIV infection during a blood transfusion in 1983, after a heart bypass operation. His last posthumous autobiography was published in 1995.
His "first editions" of the most famous novels are among the works sought by bibliophiles around the world.
