Robbins, Harold (Harold Rubin) (pulp fiction writer)

 

(1916-1997)

Norman Mailer once famously wrote of the great novelist and short story writer Paul Bowles: “He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square . . . the call of the orgy, the end of civilization.”

These words might also be applied to another postwar fiction writer, Harold Robbins, whose trans-gressive novels and their influence on millions of devoted readers make him an equally appropriate subject for Mailer’s apocalyptic sentiment. It was Robbins who, in the culturally turbulent 1950s and 1960s, most successfully and visibly stripped away the curtain of modesty that still hung before even the more daring of mainstream American novels. Robbins strutted onto the best-seller lists with a series of brutally frank and gleefully crass novels about sex, power, violence, sex, Champagne, cocaine, yachts, fast cars, and sex.

Robbins, a character as colorful, self-possessed, and pleasure-mad as any of his own fictional creations, reinvented himself at the start of his writing career and added fiction to the story of his early years. He was not adopted, for example, was never a teenage sugar baron, and was not widowed when a supposed Asian wife was killed by a diseased parrot. Born Harold Rubin in New York City, the son of well-educated Russian and Polish immigrants, his father a successful pharmacist, Harold married at a young age and worked for some years on the business side of Universal Pictures, first in New York and then in California. Feeling, in the time-honored tradition, that he could come up with something better than the topics he saw Universal buying for the movies, he wrote his first novel. Never Love a Stranger was a tempestuous bildungsroman in the tradition of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan. It was a critical and popular success. Already Robbins’s treatment of sex—though tame by comparison to his later work—was sufficiently strong to get the topic banned in Philadelphia. He followed it with a powerful story of early Hollywood, The Dream Merchants. His third novel, A Stone for Danny Fisher, was, like his first, a tale of a young man’s struggles on the New York streets and contained many elements of autobiography. The topic was critically acclaimed, and might have positioned Robbins as a serious postwar novelist. But Rob-bins had other fish to fry.

With the publication of The Carpetbaggers (1961), Harold Robbins left his literary competition in the dust—and left literature there too, according to his critics. The topic was a thick, teeming, bluntly written saga of the industrialist/pilot/movie mogul/ bastard Jonas Cord, a figure clearly based on Howard Hughes. Other characters in the topic also were easily identifiable as real-life personages. The Carpetbaggers presented a winning formula for the author—big, brawling stories with characters drawn from the headlines. He followed it with such top sellers as The Adventurers, The Betsy, The Pirate, and other hedonism-soaked pulp epics of the rich, the famous, and the sexually adventurous. Robbins relocated to the French Riviera and other sultry spots, where his own hedonistic nihilism—along with a devotion to drugs, orgies, and yachts—made writing an inconvenience. There are tales of the author being locked in hotel suites without room service, until he produced a sufficient number of typed pages, and of losing track of characters’ identities from chapter to chapter and refusing to fix the mistakes. The later works show an increasingly skin-and-bones style and a brute dependence on the sort of kinky sex scenes and dirty talk that Robbins hoped would keep him in lobster and cocaine money.

Eventually, in developments as over-the-top as his best (and worst) plot devices, Robbins lost it all. He became seriously ill, went broke as a result, lost his wife, and was unable to continue writing. He rallied in the years before his death in 1997, returning to print with new works and sequels to old successes, although his sales were nothing like they were in the old days. Readers were considerably harder to shock at the dusk of the 20th century. Still, many of Robbins’s titles remain paperback perennials, and a worldwide audience continues to enjoy his propulsive, entertaining tours of wretched excess.

Works

  • Adventurers, The (1966);
  • Betsy, The (1971);
  • Carpetbaggers, The (1961);
  • Descent from Xanadu (1984);
  • Dream Merchants. The (1949);
  • Dreams Die First (1977);
  • Goodbye, Janette (1981);
  • Inheritors, The (1969);
  • Lonely Lady, The (1976);
  • Memories of Another Day (1979);
  • Never Leave Me (1953);
  • Never Love a Stranger (1948);
  • Piranhas, The (1986);
  • Pirate, The (1974);
  • Raiders, The (1994);
  • 79 Park Avenue (1953);
  • Spellbinder (1982);
  • Stallion, The (1996);
  • Stiletto (1960);
  • Stone for Danny Fisher, A (1952);
  • Storyteller, The (1985);
  • Tycoon (1997);
  • Where Love Has Gone (1962)

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