Harold Robbins was born Harold Rubin in New York City, the son of well-educated Russian and Polish immigrants. His father was a successful pharmacist. Robbins was educated at the George Washington High School and after leaving off the school he worked at several jobs. By the age of twenty, Robbins had made his first million by selling sugar for the wholesale trade. At the beginning of World War II, Robbins had lost all his fortune.
Robbins married at a young age and moved to Hollywood where he worked for Universal Pictures, first as a shipping clerk. Later he became a studio executive. His first book Never Love a Stranger (1948) followed the rise of an orphan from the streets of New York, creating controversy with its graphic sexuality. In Philadelphia the book was banned. The Dream Merchants (1949) was about Hollywood’s film industry, from the first stages to the sound era. Again Robbins blended his own experiences, historical facts, melodrama, sex, and action into a fast-moving story. Never Leave Me (1953), Robbins’ fourth book, is set in New York.
The Carpetbaggers (1961) was an international bestseller.
From 1957 Robbins worked as a full-time writer. Although Robbins did not have success with literary critics, he believed he would be recognized as the world´s best author sooner or later. “You got something going inside you,” he wrote in Dreams Die First (1977). Of his many works perhaps the most acclaimed was A Stone for Danny Fisher (1951), a coming-of-age story set in New York in the Depression. The book was turned into a musical under the title King Creole (1958), starring Elvis Presley. Other books include The Betsy (1971), which centered on a shrewd business-minded racing car driver. Memories of Another Day (1979) was the story of a union leader with connections to the real life character of Jimmy Hoffa. The Storyteller (1985) took the reader into the life of a trash writer in 1940s Hollywood. Descent from Xanadu (1984) was the story of a rich industrialist who tries to find a remedy against ageing.
Robbins was married five times. From 1982 he was obliged to use a wheelchair because of hip trouble but he continued writing.
Several of Robbins’s books have been made into films, among them Never Love A Stranger (1958), dir. by Robert Stevens, The Carpetbaggers (1964), directed by Edward Dmytryk, The Betsy (1977), directed by Daniel Petrie, and Harold Robbins’ Body Parts (1999), produced by Roger Corman. Harold Robbins died in 1997. His posthumously published novel, The Predators (1998), is a combination of A Stone for Danny Fisher and The Carpetbaggers.
His son becomes a lawyer and is gradually drawn into the world of his father. Never Enough (2001), about four friends and a crime, is based on Robbins’s story ideas and was finished by a ghostwriter. Heat of Passion (2003) also gave work for an anonymous ghostwriter. Robbins’s ex-wife Grace published in 1999 a book of memoir about her life with the best-selling author.
