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Golden Age (1974), which carried Asimov back to his earliest memories of reading SF and brought his life story up to The Early Asimov, illustrated with his favorite science-fiction stories among those he read between 1931 and 1938.
All of these works were limbering-up exercises for the massive autobiography in two volumes, the first of which came out in 1979 as his 200th book (along with Opus 200, which he put together in fairness to Houghton Mifflin, which had published Opus 100). The autobiography offers 1,560 pages of Asimov's life story, complete with photographs, a list of his two hundred books, and indexes (which, he informed his readers, he did not trust anyone else to do). In 1994, two years after his death, I. Asimov: A Memoir was published, adding some 562 pages to the story of his life.
Asimov devoted hundreds of thousands of words perhaps as much as a million to his self-description of a man who, he admitted, had "never done anything." The recollections progressed from "and then I read" to "and then I wrote" because Asimov's life has been woven from the warp and woof of reading and writing. The triumph of his writing skill was that he made it all so readable.
This kind of obsession with self might have been insufferable in a person who was not at the same time openly amazed at the good fortune, success, plaudits, renown, and wealth that came his way. Asimov was greatly honored and richly rewarded for remarkable achievements. Even so, to interpret everything in terms of one's own reaction to it, including World War II, may seem excessively egotistical. But Asimov's attitude of "cheerful self-appreciation," which sometimes broke over into "charming Asimovian immodesties" (a phrase coined by a Doubleday editor in response to a Time magazine article quoting some of Asimov's self-praise), was balanced by disarming Asimovian self-denigration.
In his autobiographical writings and comments, Asimov continually invited the reader to share his triumphs, to laugh at his blunders and lack of sophistication, and to wonder, with him, at the rise to prominence of a bright Jewish boy brought to this country from Russia at the age of three and raised in a succession of Brooklyn candy stores. Asimov was aided too by the fact that his readers were predisposed to enjoy his success with him. Some were admirers of his science popularizations and other non-fiction books and were curious about his earlier life; others were science-fiction readers and fans, and the science-fiction community still retains much of the solidarity and lack of envy of its early ghetto days.

 
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