哈罗德·罗宾斯

哈罗德·罗宾斯（Harold Robbins，1916年5月21日—1997年10月14日）是一位美国通俗小说作家。他一生写了25本以上的畅销书。

生平

他的父母是来自俄罗斯帝国的犹太移民，父亲来自敖德萨，母亲来自涅斯维日。

罗宾斯15岁时从高中辍学，并加入美国海军。

罗宾斯做过各种各样的工作，例如他当过杂货店的库存管理员。 1940年至1957年期间，他是环球影业的雇员。

Harold Robbins (born Francis Kane; May 21, 1916 – October 14, 1997) was an American author. 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 Francis Kane to unknown parents in New York City in 1916. He was adopted by Frances "Fannie" Smith and Charles Rubin, 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 at 15 to enlist in the U.S. Navy. He claimed to have served on a submarine that was torpedoed, leaving him as the sole survivor; in fact, no U.S. submarines were torpedoed during the 1930s.

Robbins worked 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 (1961)—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.

Film producer Joseph E. Levine acquired the rights to The Carpetbaggers in September 1962 and produced the 1964 film. He also acquired the rights to Robbins's next book Where Love Has Gone (1962) with the film version also released in 1964. In 1963, Levine paid Robbins $1 million for pre-publication and film rights for Robbins's upcoming book The Adventurers. The book was released in 1966 and was based on Robbins's experiences living in South America, including three months spent in the mountains of Colombia with a group of bandits. The film version was released in 1970. Robbins also created the ABC television series The Survivors (1969–1970), starring Ralph Bellamy and Lana Turner.

Robbins's 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's 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's 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 retroactive permission to appropriate from his work, avoiding legal action on his publisher's part.