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.
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.