Works
Payne had more than 110 books published, including novels, histories and biographies. He was best known for the biographies, which included studies of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Chiang Kai-shek, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Sun Yat-sen, André Malraux, William 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. For his biographies, he wrote under the name "Robert Payne." In 1954, he published a pastiche novella, The Deluge, as Leonardo da Vinci; the book was mostly Payne's writing, incorporating "fragmentary da Vinci notes."
One of Payne's better-known works is The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (1973). This biography is now perceived to be tremendously flawed. It is widely acknowledged that Payne uncritically accepted unreliable sources -- including Bridget Dowling (Hitler's sister-in-law) for a completely fictional year spent in Liverpool, England. However at this time, Dowling's claims regarding this non-existent visit had been under-researched, and even the well-known Hitler biographer Alan Bullock was unaware that they were false.
Read more about this topic: Pierre Stephen Robert Payne
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)
“Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition, where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools, and rests from its pragmatic labors, while its works do not follow it, but are simply forgotten, and are as if they never had been.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“Piety practised in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendour of beneficence.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)