Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex - Hardcover

Wilson, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596910089 ISBN 13: 9781596910089

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2007

Synopsis

A sizzling, sexy biography of the blockbuster author whose life of excess was as racy as one of his own novels.

During his fifty-year career Harold Robbins, the godfather of the airport novel, sold approximately 750 million copies of his books worldwide. His seventh novel, The Carpetbaggers, a steamy tale of sex, greed, and corruption loosely based on the life of Howard Hughes, is the fourth most read book in history. As decadent as his fiction was, however, his life was just as profligate. Over the course of his five-decade career, Robbins spent money as quickly as he earned it, reportedly wasting away $50 million on everything from booze and drugs to yachts and prostitutes. Based on extensive interviews with family members and friends, including Larry Flynt and Barbara Eden, Harold Robbins examines the remarkable life of the man who gave birth to the cult of the modern bestseller and introduced sex to the American marketplace.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Wilson is a novelist, biographer and journalist. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Biography (2004) and the LAMBDA Literary Award (2003) for Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. He was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize (2003) for the same book. His non-fiction books also include biographies of Sylvia Plath, Alexander McQueen, Harold Robbins and a group biography of the survivors of the Titanic. His first novel, The Lying Tongue, published in 2007, was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award. He is the author of four novels which feature Agatha Christie as a detective. Writing under the pseudonym of E.V. Adamson, he is the author of the psychological thriller Five Strangers. He is also a creative writing mentor on the Gold Dust scheme and the new tutor on the Faber Academy crime course.

Reviews

Harold Robbins (1916–1997), whose potboilers sold 750 million copies worldwide during his lifetime, was born into a middle-class Brooklyn Jewish family. But as Wilson relates in this shallow biography, Robbins often fabricated a past as Czar Nicholas's illegitimate son or a lonely orphan who became a sailor indulging in gay sex on a submarine. Early works like the autobiographical, Depression-era A Stone for Danny Fisher showed talent, and his fictionalized portrait of Howard Hughes, The Carpetbaggers, was made into a film and catapulted him to fame. But, Wilson says, Robbins's novels grew schlockier and repetitive as he wrote to sustain his cocaine-fueled lifestyle of fancy cars and mansions, prostitutes and gambling. Particularly damning is the testimony of Robbins's Simon & Schuster editor, Michael Korda, who recalls a bitter, sneering writer tossing off pages in exchange for a check. Hustler founder Larry Flynt's inflated claim that Robbins was as much a celebrity as Tom Cruise is repeated by Wilson with scant skepticism or analysis, and it's doubtful that this lackluster effort will gain Robbins new fans. This misfire by the Edgar-winning biographer of Patricia Highsmith (Beautiful Shadow) is more an extended magazine article intended to titillate than a serious biography or a fruitful dissection of the American bestseller. 8 pages of photos. (Sept.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1596910089
• ISBN 13: 9781596910089
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320