ROBBINS, ACCLAIMED AUTHOR.Byline: Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. Harold Robbins Harold Robbins was an American author. Robbins claimed to be a Jewish orphan raised in a Catholic boys home who made and lost a fortune by age 20. In fact, Harold Rubin was reared by his pharmacist father and stepmother in Brooklyn. , an orphan who became a millionaire at 20 then lost it all before becoming the author of steamy novels including ``The Carpetbaggers'' and ``Never Love a Stranger,'' died Tuesday. He was 81. Robbins, whose novels were sold around the world and turned into Hollywood movies, died shortly before noon at Desert Hospital, a spokesman said. He had no further details. Robbins kept writing novels despite a stroke in 1982 that left him with a slight case of aphasia aphasia (əfā`zhə), language disturbance caused by a lesion of the brain, making an individual partially or totally impaired in his ability to speak, write, or comprehend the meaning of spoken or written words. , which sometimes blocked his ability to put thoughts into words. ``The Stallion'' was published in early 1996. In an interview in 1996 with The New Yorker magazine, Robbins said he had no choice but to keep writing. ``I haven't any money. First of all, my medical bills were unbelievable. Then I got divorced'' in 1992, said Robbins, who also suffered from hip ailments that kept him in a wheelchair. Born in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. on May 21, 1916, Robbins dropped out of George Washington High School Many high schools in the United States are named after George Washington, first President of the United States, including::
During the Depression he showed entrepreneurial flair by buying up crops and selling options to canning companies, and the canning contracts to wholesale grocers. He was a millionaire by the time he was 20, but speculation in sugar before the outbreak of World War II stripped him of his fortune. In 1940 he landed a job as a $27-a-week shipping clerk at the New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of warehouse of Universal Pictures, where he eventually became executive director of budget and planning. He became interested in writing through his involvement in the acquisition of literary properties for Universal. Robbins' most critically acclaimed novels drew on his own experiences as a youth in New York: ``Never Love a Stranger,'' his first novel published in 1948, told the story of a hustling New York orphan who became a cynical garment district racketeer and finally died in World War II. His third book, ``A Stone for Danny Fisher A Stone For Danny Fisher is a very serious, early novel by Harold Robbins that looks at the effect of the Great Depression on a lower-middle class Jewish family. Written in 1952 it is actually set in the period up to 1944. ,'' published in 1952, is the story of a sensitive prize fighter who resists bribes offered by gangsters. His most popular work, ``The Carpetbaggers carpetbaggers, epithet used in the South after the Civil War to describe Northerners who went to the South during Reconstruction to make money. Although regarded as transients because of the carpetbags in which they carried their possessions (hence the name ,'' was published in 1961 and sold 6 million copies. The second part of a panoramic Hollywood trilogy that began with ``The Dream Merchants,'' ``The Carpetbaggers'' focused on a ruthlessly ambitious empire builder whose domain straddled the worlds of film, finance, aviation and Las Vegas gambling. Some of his books were turned into films: ``Never Love a Stranger,'' ``Where Love has Gone,'' ``The Carpetbaggers,'' and ``The Adventurers.'' Paramount's ``King Creole'' was a version of ``A Stone for Danny Fisher.'' CAPTION(S): Photo PHOTO ROBBINS |
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