Asimov was brought to the United States at age three. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, graduating from Columbia University in 1939 and taking a Ph.D. there in 1948. He then joined the faculty of Boston University, with which he remained associated thereafter.

Asimov began contributing stories to science-fiction magazines in 1939 and in 1950 published his first book, Pebble in the Sky. His trilogy of novels, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation (1951–53), which recounts the collapse and rebirth of a vast interstellar empire in the universe of the future, is his most famous work of science fiction. In the short-story collection I, Robot (1950; filmed 2004), he developed a set of ethics for robots and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers' treatment of the subject. His other novels and collections of stories included The Stars, like Dust (1951), The Currents of Space (1952), The Caves of Steel (1954), The Naked Sun (1957), Earth Is Room Enough (1957), Foundation's Edge (1982), and The Robots of Dawn (1983). His "Nightfall" (1941) is thought by many to be the finest science-fiction short story ever written. Among Asimov's books on various topics in science, written with lucidity and humour, are The Chemicals of Life (1954), Inside the Atom (1956), The World of Nitrogen (1958), Life and Energy (1962), The Human Brain (1964), The Neutrino (1966), Science, Numbers, and I (1968), Our World in Space (1974), and Views of the Universe (1981). He also published two volumes of autobiography.