Work
His first book, Never Love a Stranger (1948), caused controversy with its graphic sexuality.
The Dream Merchants (1949) was a novel about the American film industry, from its beginning to the sound era. Again Robbins blended his own experiences, historical facts, melodrama, sex, and action 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 – loosely based on a composite of Howard Hughes, Bill Lear, Harry Cohn, and Louis B. Mayer – taking the reader from New York to California, from the prosperity of the aeronautics|aeronautical industry to the glamour of Hollywood. Its sequel, The Raiders, was released in 1995.
Since his death, several new books have been published, written by ghostwriters and based on Robbins's own notes and unfinished stories. On several of these final books, Junius Podrug has been credited as co-writer.
From the Hodder & Stoughton 2008 edition of The Carpetbaggers About the author section:
Robbins was the playboy of his day and a master of publicity. He was a renowned novelist but tales of his own life contain even more fiction than his books. What is known is that with reported worldwide sales of 750m, Harold Robbins sold more books than J.K. Rowling, earned and spent $50m during his lifetime, and was as much a part of the sexual and social revolution as the pill, Playboy and pot. In March 1965, he had three novels on the British paperback bestseller list – Where Love Has Gone at No.1, The Carpetbaggers at No.3 and The Dream Merchants in the sixth spot.
His widow, Jann Robbins, has republished 12 of his most famous titles with AuthorHouse Publishing.
Read more about this topic: Harold Robbins
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“If the heart beguiles itself in its choice [of a wife], and imagination will give excellencies which are not the portion of flesh and blood:Mwhen the dream is over, and we awake in the morning, it matters little whether ‘tis Rachael or Leah,—be the object what it will, as it must be on the earthly side ... of perfection,—it will fall short of the work of fancy, whose existence is in the clouds.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)