Isaac Asimov and Janet Opal Jeppson - Dating, Gossip, News, Photos list. Help us build our profile of Isaac Asimov and Janet Opal Jeppson!
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Nov 30, 1973 - April 6, 1992
Asimov had known Janet Opal Jeppson since 1959.
She had met Isaac at a 1959 Mystery Writers of American banquet at which the editor Robert P. Mills asked her what book had turned her on to science fiction. "Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End," she had replied. This pleased Isaac although he was miffed that it was not one of his works. When Mills asked her about Unto the Fourth Generation, she had replied that she didn't like stories "in which things happen but unravel at the end so that nothing changes, like Penelope's knitting." She preferred, she said, stories in which people end up being different as a result of what has happened. When Mills mentioned that it was Isaac's story, she gasped, then quickly covered with "My criticism comes out of being a psychoanalyst, because we try to help people change."
She was a psychoanalyst and also a writer of science fiction for children. Correspondence with her convinced Asimov that she was the right kind of person for him. He and Gertrude were separated in 1970, and he moved in with Janet Jeppson almost at once. His first marriage ended in divorce in 1973. That same year he and Janet Jeppson were married at Janet's home by an official of Ethical Culture Society. Asimov had no children by his second marriage.