Pierre Stephen Robert Payne

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (December 4 1911 – March 3 1983), was a novelist, historian, poet, and biographer.

Born in Cornwall, the son of an English naval architect, and with a French mother. He worked as a shipbuilder and then for a time with the Inland Revenue. In 1941 he became an armament officer and chief camouflage officer for British Army Intelligence at Singapore.

In the summer of 1946, Payne traveled to China and visited with and interviewed Mao Zedong in Yenan. During the interview Mao correctly predicted that it would only take the Communist forces a year and a half to conquer China once the armistice with the Chiang Kai-shek and his followers was broken [Halberstam "The Coldest Winter", pp.233-34.] .

Payne had more than 110 books published, novels, histories and biographies. He was best known for the biographies, which included studies of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Dostoyevsky,Ivan the Terrible, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Sun Yat-sen, André Malraux, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, The White Rajahs of Sarawak and George C. Marshall.

As a novelist, Payne used the pseudonyms Richard Cargoe, John Anthony Devon, Howard Horne, Valentin Tikhonov, and Robert Young. In his biographies, he appears as Robert Payne rather than Pierre Stephen Robert Payne.

elected works

* "The Dream and the Tomb" (published posthumously in 1984)
*"Leonardo", a 1978 biography of Leonardo da Vinci in which Payne asserts that the "Mona Lisa" is a portrait of Isabella of Aragon and that the traditional chalk self-portrait of da Vinci is actually a portrait of his father.
* "Ivan the Terrible"
*"Hubris: A Study of Pride" Harper Torch Books NY (1960) (no ISBN), with an introduction by Sir Herbert Read. "Hubris" is a revised paperback version of "The Wanton Nymph: A Study of Pride.":: Walter Kaufmann footnotes "Hubris" in his book "Tragedy and Philosophy." He wrote that "Few have crowded as many popular misconceptions about Aeschylus and Sophocles into as few pages as has Robert Payne in" Hubris: A Study of Pride "(1960), 20-31", p.63
*"The Wanton Nymph: A Study of Pride" published by William Heinemann, Ltd. London (1951)(no ISBN)

References

;Notes

;Bibliography
* cite book
last = Halberstam
first = David
coauthors =
year = 2007
title = The Coldest WInter - America and the Korean War
publisher = Hyperion
location = New York
id = ISBN 978-140130-052-4

;Web
* [http://www.sunysb.edu/libspecial/collections/manuscripts/payne/biography.shtml Biography]
* [http://www.sunysb.edu/libspecial/collections/manuscripts/payne/bibliography.shtml Bibliography]