Harold Robbins

Harold Robbins
Born	Harold Rubin (1916-05-21)May 21, 1916 New York City
Died	October 14, 1997(1997-10-14) (aged 81) Palm Springs, California
Nationality	American
Occupation	Author

Harold Robbins (May 21, 1916 – October 14, 1997) was an American author of popular novels. One of the best-selling writers of all time, he penned over 25 best-sellers, selling over 750 million copies in 32 languages.

Born Harold Rubin in New York City, Robbins later claimed to be a Jewish orphan who had been raised in a Catholic boys home.^{[citation needed]} In reality he was the son of well-educated Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. He was raised by his father, who was a pharmacist, and his stepmother in Brooklyn.

Work

His first book, Never Love a Stranger (1948), caused controversy due to its graphic sexuality. The Dream Merchants (1949) was a novel about the American film industry, from its beginning to the sound era. Again, Robbins blended his own experiences with historical facts, melodrama, sex and action, into a fast-moving story.^{[citation needed]} His 1952 novel, A Stone for Danny Fisher, was adapted into a 1958 motion picture King Creole, which starred Elvis Presley.

Among his best-known books is The Carpetbaggers – loosely based on a composite of Howard Hughes, Bill Lear, Harry Cohn, and Louis B. Mayer. The Carpetbaggers takes the reader from New York to California, from the prosperity of the aeronautical industry to the glamour of Hollywood. Its sequel, The Raiders, was released in 1995.

After The Carpetbaggers (1961) and Where Love Has Gone (1962) came The Adventurers (1966), based on Robbins’s experiences living in South America, including three months spent in the mountains of Colombia with a group of bandits. He created the ABC television series The Survivors (1969-1970), starring Ralph Bellamy and Lana Turner. For his eager readers, the novels kept appearing: The Inheritors (1969), The Betsy (1971), The Pirate (1974), The Lonely Lady (1976), Dreams Die First (1977), Memories of Another Day (1979), Goodbye, Janette (1981), and Spellbinder (1982). But critics continued to be unenthusiastic. One summed up his writing as “steamy, sordid, and violent,” while another decried Robbins’s “unprincipled use of characters who deliberately resemble well-known men and women now dead.” In responding to speculations about who his characters might be in real life, Robbins insisted that his characters were composites of people, not fictional portraits of actual individuals. As he told Thompson, “When you write about what seems to be a familiar world, people tend to put labels on the characters right away.”

Since his death, several new books have been published, written by ghostwriters and based on Robbins's own notes and unfinished stories. In several of these books, Junius Podrug has been credited as co-writer.

From the Hodder & Stoughton 2008 edition of The Carpetbaggers About the author section:

Robbins was the playboy of his day and a master of publicity. He was a renowned novelist but tales of his own life contain even more fiction than his books. What is known is that with reported worldwide sales of 750m, Harold Robbins sold more books than J.K. Rowling, earned and spent $50m during his lifetime, and was as much a part of the sexual and social revolution as the pill, Playboy and pot. In March 1965, he had three novels on the British paperback bestseller list – Where Love Has Gone at No.1, The Carpetbaggers at No.3 and The Dream Merchants in the sixth spot.

His widow, Jann Robbins, has republished 12 of his most famous titles with AuthorHouse Publishing.^{[citation needed]}

Personal life

Robbins was married three times, his first wife was his high school sweetheart. He spent a great deal of time on the French Riviera and at Monte Carlo until his death on October 14, 1997, from respiratory heart failure, at the age of 81 in Palm Springs, California. He is buried nearby at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cathedral City. Robbins has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6743 Hollywood Boulevard.

Novels

• Never Love A Stranger, 1948 (adapted into the 1958 film of the same name)
• The Dream Merchants, 1949 (adapted into a TV movie in 1980)
• A Stone for Danny Fisher, 1952 (adapted into the film King Creole (1958)
• Never Leave Me, 1953
• 79 Park Avenue, 1955
• Stiletto, 1960 (adapted into the 1969 film, Stiletto)
• The Carpetbaggers, 1961 (adapted into both the 1964 film of the same title and the 1966 film Nevada Smith)
• Where Love Has Gone, 1962
• The Adventurers, 1966; this was adapted for the cinema as The Adventurers in 1970 by Lewis Gilbert
• The Inheritors, 1969
• The Betsy, 1971 (made into the film of the same title in 1978)
• The Pirate, 1974 (made into a TV movie in 1978)
• The Lonely Lady, 1976 (adapted into the 1983 film of the same title)
• Dreams Die First, 1977
• Memories of Another Day, 1979
• Goodbye, Janette, 1981
• The Storyteller, 1982
• Spellbinder, 1982
• Descent from Xanadu, 1984
• The Piranhas, 1986
• The Raiders, 1995 (sequel to The Carpetbaggers)
• The Stallion, 1996 (sequel to The Betsy)
• Tycoon, 1997
• The Predators, 1998
• The Secret, 2000 (sequel to The Predators)
• Never Enough, 2001
• Sin City, 2002
• Heat of Passion, 2003
• The Betrayers, (with Junius Podrug) 2004
• Blood Royal, (with Junius Podrug) 2005
• The Devil to Pay, (with Junius Podrug) 2006
• The Looters, (with Junius Podrug) 2007, Madison Dupree No. 1
• The Deceivers, (with Junius Podrug) 2008, Madison Dupree No. 2
• The Shroud, (with Junius Podrug) 2009, Madison Dupree No. 3
• The Curse, (with Junius Podrug) 2011, Madison Dupree No. 4

External links

• Harold Robbins at Internet Book List [1]