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"Cool Green Hills" was published in 1951. I read it in "The Saturday Evening Post" and while I'd read a lot of science fiction before that, that story and poem really grabbed me. I started devouring everything Heinlein wrote along with all the other greats of that time: Leinster, Asimov, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Ted Sturgeon, L. Sprague de Camp, Kuttner, Kornbluth and many others. What a great time for imaginative fiction! Of course when fact started catching up with fiction those old space operas began to lose their sparkle.

Does anyone else remember an illustrator for Astounding/Analog named Cartier who did very distinctive line drawings? Does anyone know what happened to him/her?

Can't help you with the line drawing question, but I've noticed that SF from the immediate post WWII era was the best. The "Astounding Stories" era, as I think of it.

One of the things I noticed about SF from that era was how "New York City-centric" it was. At that time, many SF writers and other futurists actually thought NYC and Long Island would be where the inventors of the World of Tomorrow would go to work every day. Silicon Valley was a '60's (and '70's, and '80's) phenomenon.

I was a "member" of something called The Science Fiction Book Club from about seventh grade (1967) till well into college. Got exposed to many cutting-edge authors through that. I remember that, just before I quit it, it veered off into a number of counter-culture themes, particularly some involving the gay lifestyle, that were disturbing to me (as an adolescent, anyway). That was the zeitgeist at the time (early '70's), no doubt about it.

(steely)