Robert K. Massie

Robert Kinloch Massie (born 1929) is an American historian, writer, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and a Rhodes Scholar.

Biography

Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1929, Massie spent much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee and currently resides in Westchester County, New York in the village of Irvington. He studied American history at Yale University and modern European history at Oxford University on his Rhodes Scholarship. Massie went to work as a journalist for Newsweek from 1959 to 1964 and then took a position at the Saturday Evening Post.

After he and his family left America for France, Massie wrote and published his breakthrough book, "Nicholas and Alexandra", a biography of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra of Hesse, and their family and cultural/political milieu. Massie's interest in the Tsar's family was triggered by the birth of his son, the Rev. Robert Kinloch Massie, who suffers from hemophilia, a hereditary disease that also afflicted the last Tsar's son, Alexei. In 1971, the book was the basis of an Academy Award winning film of the same title. In 1995, in his book "", Massie updated "Nicholas and Alexandra" with much newly-discovered information.

In 1975, Robert Massie and his then-wife Suzanne chronicled their experiences as the parents of a hemophiliac child and the significant differences between the American and French health-care systems in their jointly-written book, "Journey".

Massie won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for "Peter the Great: His Life and World". This book inspired a 1986 NBC mini-series that won three Emmy Awards, ("Peter the Great (TV Series)") and starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave.

Massie was the president of the Authors Guild from 1987 to 1991, and he still serves as an ex officio council member. [http://www.authorsguild.org/?p=181] While president of the Guild, he famously called on authors to boycott any store refusing to carry Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses". [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,957187-4,00.html]

Books by Massie

*"" (Balantine Books, c2004) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-345-40878-0(also J. Cape, 2004, ISBN 0-224-04092-8)
*"" (Random House, c1991) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-394-52833-6 (also Ballantine Books, 1992, ISBN 0-345-37556-4)
*"Journey" (Knopf, 1975) by Robert and Suzanne Massie, ISBN 0-394-49018-5
*"Last Courts of Europe: Royal Family Album, 1860-1914" (Vendome Press, 1981) introductory text by Robert K. Massie ; picture research and description by Jeffrey Finestone, ISBN 0-86565-015-2 (also Greenwich House/Crown Publishers, c1983, ISBN 0-517-41472-4)
*"Nicholas and Alexandra: An Intimate Account of the Last of the Romanovs and the Fall of Imperial Russia" (Athenum, 1967) by Robert K. Massie, ASIN B000CGP8M2 (also, Ballantine Books, 2000, ISBN 0-345-43831-0 and Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2005, ISBN 1-57912-433-X)
*"Peter the Great: His Life and World" (Knopf, 1980) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-394-50032-6 (also Ballantine Books, 1981, ISBN 0-345-29806-3 and Wings Books, 1991, ISBN 0-517-06483-9)
*"The Romanovs: The Final Chapter" (Random House, 1995) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-394-58048-6 and ISBN 0-679-43572-7
*"There's an Old Southern Saying: The Wit and Wisdom of Dan May" (Crabby Keys Press, 1993) compiled by William May Stern, foreword by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-9638911-0-3

References

* [http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1091 Massie Interview with Booknotes on "Dreadnought"]
* [http://www.washtimes.com/books/20040313-103729-8239r.htm "How WWI was waged at sea deck"] by John M. Taylor in The Washington Times. Review of "Dreadnought" including brief biographical notes on Massie.