Biography
Campbell was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1910. His father was a cold, impersonal, and unaffectionate electrical engineer. His mother, Dorothy (née Strahern) was warm but changeable of character and had an identical twin who visited them often and who disliked young John. John was unable to tell them apart and was frequently coldly rebuffed by the person he took to be his mother.
Campbell attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was befriended by Norbert Wiener, who coined the term Cybernetics. He began writing science fiction at age 18 and quickly sold his first stories. By the time he was 21 he was a well-known pulp writer but had been dismissed by MIT: he had failed German. He then spent one year at Duke University, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in physics in 1932.
He married Dona Stewart in 1931, and they were divorced in 1949. Campbell married Margaret (Peg) Winter in 1950. He spent most of his life in New Jersey and died at home.
Read more about this topic: John W. Campbell
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