What could be more America-in-the-early-1950s than to pack up your family in a long, long trailer and set off to see what there was to be seen? Mr. and Mrs. Middle-Class (and the junior Middle-Classes and typically a middle-class pet or two) responded to the breakup of settled lifeways just as Jack Kerouac and his bohemian friends had done in the late 1940s. Few of them pounded out nonstop novels on continuous rolls of teletype paper, but children's novels on the subject did appear as the decade wore on. Some went from midwest to New York City; others took families and house trailers (and converted buses) to the no-longer-quite-so-wild west.
But Robert A. Heinlein got there first—and, in many ways, The Rolling Stones is the best of them all, for the others of the genre are all but forgotten while The Rolling Stones continues in print continues to delight, and continues to keep alive the story of the Restless Worm.
Heinlein had no idea for a story when he needed to start his fourth boys' book for Scribner's, late in 1951. Ginny, his wife, suggested a pair of mischievous twins—Castor and Pollux—always getting into trouble and always being hauled out by their feisty grandmother. Astronomer and science popularizer-colleague Robert S. Richardson wanted to see more of the boy-businessman character Heinlein had created for Red Planet (another story that turns on family solidarity). That reminded him of Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, and the mischievous twins became fast-talking, sharp-dealing flim-flam men in-the-making (and gave him his working title, "The Unheavenly Twins").
His editor at Scribner's, Miss Dalgliesh, had requested he work in a teen-aged girl (which seemed reasonable, as he was getting a surprising amount of fan mail from teenaged girls about his "boys' books"). Ginny, a biochemist, became the model for the mother, Dr. Stone, and the teenaged girl, Meade, as well. He put himself into the book as the father, an engineer-politician-turned-writer grinding out a space-opera serial, "Scourge of the Spaceways," and also as the youngest child, unnaturally bright and a little strange—age about four, when his own grandfather had taught him to play chess.
The Stone family thus came together in his mind very easily, and soon he could hear them talking—the stage at which he began to write. He still did not have a plot.
"What do I have them do next," he asked Ginny each day, and together they worked out the incidents and the flow of the story as it developed. "The bicycles were Robert's idea," Ginny recalled at one point. "And the flat cats," derived from Ellis Parker Butler's humorous short story, "Pigs is Pigs" (about guinea pigs multiplying in a Post Office while held up for delivery).
Heinlein was not entirely comfortable working this way. Putting it together on the fly, piece by piece, was a struggle. "The trouble is," he wrote his agent, Lurton Blassingame, at the beginning of December 1951, that I am trying to do domestic comedy this time with nothing much in the way of revolutions and blood—and I find comedy harder to write. Oh, I can keep up wisecracking dialog all too easily, but the characters have to do something too, something important.
Nevertheless, he had the "something important to do" firmly in mind: the boys learn how to be responsible adults—mostly from their mistakes (as we all do).
It may have felt like a struggle, but The Rolling Stones did not take longer than his usual month to write—and went so smoothly that he was able to send in his straight-from-the-typewriter draft (after retyping a couple dozen correction pages), instead of having to send it out to be professionally retyped (his usual practice).
His editor's initial reaction to the story, early in January 1952, was a kind of written-out gasp of delight. "You are a wonder!" Miss Dalgliesh wrote:
All morning I've been hanging breathless on the pages of The Rolling Stones and laughing out loud as I read, too. When I came to where Dr. Stone is transferred from one ship to another I practically collapsed. And the flat cats! How do you do it?
He was to science fiction, she went on to tell him, what Erle Stanley Gardner was to mystery.
After such a promising initial reception, preparing The Rolling Stones for press turned out nearly as exasperating as Red Planet had been. Some of Miss Dalgliesh's editorial quibbles were just silly: she objected to the asteroid prospector's name, "Old Charley" as disrespectful because Charles Scribner, the owner of the publishing house, had died recently. Her Freudian objection to the "pulsing love habits" of the flat cats was irritating and startling. "What love habits?" Heinlein wrote back to her. He had carefully de-sexed the creatures—
Having given in on the Red Planet matters, Heinlein stood firm on these quibbles. He took one of Miss Dalgliesh's books (one that had been given the Newbery Honor in 1945) and gave it the same level of scrutiny Miss Dalgliesh was leveling at him. At that level, everything is sex. The criticism was absurd.
It is clear that, at some point the balance of power shifted in Heinlein's relations with Miss Dalgliesh, and this may be it. Initially, all the power lay in Miss Dalgliesh's hands. The first two books passed with no serious problems; the third, Red Planet, left him emotionally bruised; with The Rolling Stones Heinlein began to stand his ground against the most fiddling and pettifogging of the editorial interference—while maintaining respect for Miss Dalgliesh's goal (which was his goal also) of assuring that nothing actually stood in the way of his books being purchased by old-maid librarians (of either sex). His problem—for which he also relied on Ginny's intuition—became to sort out what was really objectionable from what was only excessive over-sensitivity to imaginary librarians.
The book was published with only the essential revisions, and the path Heinlein would follow for the next seven years was set.