Short answers, pulled from the story.
Robert Ettinger is an American academic who published The Prospect of Immortality in 1964 through Doubleday, launching the modern cryonics movement. He founded the Cryonics Institute and the Immortalist Society. Every person active in cryonics today can trace their involvement directly or indirectly to his books.
The Prospect of Immortality was first privately published by Ettinger in 1962 and released as a Doubleday hardcover in 1964. It argued that future technological advances could revive people preserved by freezing at the moment of legal death. The book became a Book of the Month Club selection and was published in nine languages.
Ettinger was profoundly influenced at age 12 by a Neil R. Jones story called "The Jameson Satellite," published in the July 1931 issue of Amazing Stories, in which a frozen human body is revived by mechanical beings millions of years in the future. He later published his own science fiction story, "The Penultimate Trump," in Startling Stories in 1948, which explored the same premise.
Yes. Ettinger died on the 23rd of July, 2011, at the age of 92 in Detroit, Michigan, and was cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute he founded. His body joins those of his first wife Elaine, his second wife Mae Junod, and his mother, all of whom were also cryopreserved.
Mae Junod met Ettinger in 1962 when she attended his adult education physics course and went on to type and edit the manuscripts for both The Prospect of Immortality and Man Into Superman. She edited the cryonics movement's newsletter The Outlook, later renamed The Immortalist, from its founding until the mid-1990s. The Outlook is the longest continuously published cryonics magazine.
Ettinger earned two master's degrees from Wayne State University, one in physics and one in mathematics, and taught both subjects at Wayne State and Highland Park Community College in Michigan. He served as a second lieutenant infantryman in the United States Army during World War II, was severely wounded in Germany, and received the Purple Heart.