Catherine the Great (Massie)

Author Bio
• Birth—1929
• Where—Lexington, Kentucky, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; Oxford
   University (as a Rhodes Scholar)
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Irvington, New York


Robert Kinloch Massie III is an American historian, author, Pulitzer Prize recipient. He has devoted much of his career to studying the House of Romanov, Russia's royal family from 1613-1917.

Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1929, Massie spent much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee and currently resides in the village of Irvington, New York. He studied United States and modern European history at Yale and Oxford University, respectively, on a Rhodes Scholarship. Massie went to work as a journalist for Newsweek from 1959 to 1962 and then took a position at the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1969—before he and his family moved to France—Massie wrote and published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra, a biography of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra of Hesse. Massie's interest in the Imperial family was triggered by the birth of his son, Reverend and politician Robert Kinloch Massie IV, who was born with hemophilia—a hereditary disease that also afflicted Nicholas'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 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 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 miniseries that won three Emmy Awards and starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave. In 2011 Massie published his biography, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (2011).

Massie was the president of the Authors Guild from 1987 to 1991, and he still 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 is currently married to Deborah Karl. (From Wikipedia.)