Harold Robbins Biography

Harold Robbins was a best-selling author whose novels about sex, money and power were scorned by critics and loved by readers. After an aborted attempt in the grocery business, Robbins got work as a shipping clerk for Universal Pictures in Hollywood in the late 1930s. Robbins worked his way up to the executive level and began writing novels that could be turned into movies. In 1948 he had a hit with Never Love a Stranger, his first of many potboilers known for sloppy prose and racy passages. He began writing novels full-time around 1950 and by the mid-1960s was one of the richest authors in the world. Several of his books were bestsellers, including The Carpetbaggers (1961) and The Betsy (1971) (both of which were made into movies), and Robbins was known as a larger-than-life character who surrounded himself with women and intoxicants. By the mid-1980s low sales and bad health brought an end to the party and Robbins died deeply in debt.