Writer Walter Isaacson remembers the day when Steve Jobs asked him to write a biography of his life in 2004.

It took Isaacson by surprise and he told Jobs, “Not now. … Maybe in a decade or two, when you retire.”

But the request came right before Jobs’ first surgery for pancreatic cancer,  a health battle that ended this week.

Today, as the world continues to remember Jobs, who died Wednesday, Isaacson remembered his last conversation with Jobs.

“A few weeks ago, I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant,” Isaacson wrote in an essay in Time magazine.

(Image Credit: Apple.com)

Isaacson’s biography on Jobs, “Steve Jobs,” which was slated to be out in stores on Nov. 21, has been moved up to Oct. 24, according to book publisher Simon & Schuster, in the wake of his death.

Isaacson, who also wrote biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, said Jobs was “thought of himself as an artist,” who believed “he was doing people a service.”

In Isaacson’s last conversation with Jobs he asked the one question that has puzzled him for so long – why did the very private Jobs want to reveal so much in a book?

“I wanted my kids to know me,” Jobs told Isaacson.  ”I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”