Harold Robbins
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 wrote over 25 best-sellers, selling over 750 million copies in 32 languages. Early life. Robbins was born Harold Rubin in New York City, the son of Frances "Fannie" Smith and Charles Rubin. His parents were well-educated Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire, his father from Odessa and his mother from Neshwies (Nyasvizh), south of Minsk. Robbins later falsely claimed to be a Jewish orphan who had been raised in a Catholic  boys' home. Instead he was raised by his father, a pharmacist, and his stepmother, Blanche, in Brooklyn. Robbins dropped out of high school in the late 1920s to work in a variety of jobs, including errand boy, bookies' runner, and inventory clerk in a grocers. He was employed by Universal Pictures from 1940 to 1957, starting off as a clerk and rising to an executive. Work. His first book was "Never Love a Stranger" (1948). "The Dream Merchants" (1949) was a novel about the American film industry, from its beginning to the sound era in which Robbins blended his own  life experiences with history, melodrama, sex, and glossy high society into a fast-moving story. 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" – featuring a protagonist who was a loose 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 glamor of Hollywood. Its sequel, "The Raiders", was released in 1995. After "The Carpetbaggers" 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. The book was adapted into a film in 1970, also titled "The Adventurers". He created the flop ABC television series "The Survivors" (1969-1970), starring Ralph Bellamy and Lana Turner. Robbins' editors included Cynthia White and Michael Korda and his literary agent was Paul Gitlin. In July 1989, Robbins was involved in a literary controversy when the trade periodical "Publishers Weekly" revealed that around four pages from Robbins' novel "The Pirate  (1974) had been lifted without permission and integrated into Kathy Acker's novel The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec" (1975), which had recently been re-published in the UK in a selection of early works by Acker titled "Young Lust" (1989). After Paul Gitlin saw the exposé in "Publishers Weekly", he informed Robbins' UK publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, who requested that Acker's publisher Unwin Hyman withdraw and pulp "Young Lust". Representatives for the novelist explained that Acker was well known for her deliberate use of literary appropriation—or bricolage, a postmodern technique akin to plagiarism in which fragments of pre -existing works are combined along with original writings to create new literary works. After an intervention by William S. Burroughs—a novelist who used appropriation in his own works of the 1960s—Robbins issued a statement to give Acker retrospective permission to appropriate from his work, avoiding legal action on his publisher's part. Robbins is mentioned by name in "" by Admiral James T. Kirk; his first officer Spock mentions that Robbins was one of the 20th century "giants" of literature. Robbins is also mentioned by name by Basil Fawlty in the "Fawlty Towers" episode "Waldorf Salad"; he refers to  Robbins' work as "transatlantic tripe". The band Squeeze mentions "a Harold Robbins paperback" in their song "Pulling Mussels (From The Shell)". In Roger Corman's 1970 post-apocalyptic "Gas! -Or- It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.", a young couple uses a public library's copies of the collected works of Jacqueline Susann as kindling after the woman's initial objection to burning library books to keep warm. She says, "OK, but what if we run out?" Her boyfriend says, "Don't worry, there's an entire shelf full of Harold Robbins." 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: Personal life. Robbins was married three times, first to his high school sweetheart, Lillian Machnivitz. In 1965 he wed Grace Palermo, who went on to pen an account of her life with Robbins in 2013. Divorced in the early 1990s, Robbins married Jann Stapp in 1992; they remained together until his death. He spent  a great deal of time on the French Riviera and at Monte Carlo until his death from respiratory heart failure, at the age of 81 in Palm Springs, California. His cremated remains are interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cathedral City. Robbins has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6743 Hollywood Boulevard.