Robert K. Massie - Biography

Biography

Robert Kinloch Massie III was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1929. He spent much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee and currently resides in the village of Irvington, New York. He studied United States and European history at Yale and Oxford University, respectively, on a Rhodes Scholarship. Massie worked as a journalist for Newsweek from 1959-62 before taking a position at the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1967—before he and his family moved to France—Massie wrote and published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra, a biography of Nicholas II and Alexandra of Hesse, the last Emperor and Empress of Russia. Massie's interest in the Imperial family was triggered by the birth of his son, Robert Kinloch Massie IV, who was born with hemophilia—a hereditary disease that also afflicted Nicholas's son, Aleksey Nikolaevich. In 1971 the book was the basis of an Academy Award-winning film of the same title. In 1995, in his book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, Massie updated Nicholas and Alexandra with much newly-discovered information.

In 1975 Robert Massie and his then-wife Suzanne Massie chronicled their experiences as the parents of a child with hemophilia 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 miniseries that won three Emmy Awards and starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave. Since then, Massie has written a number of books, including most recently in 2011, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman.

He was the president of the Authors Guild from 1987-91, and currently serves as an ex officio council member. While president of the Guild, he famously called on authors to boycott any store refusing to carry Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. He currently lives with his wife, Deborah Karl, and three children.