Robert K. Massie

"Robert Massie" redirects here. For other uses, see Robert Massie (disambiguation).

Robert K. Massie
Born	Robert Kinloch Massie III (1929-01-05)January 5, 1929 Versailles, Kentucky, U.S.
Died	December 2, 2019(2019-12-02) (aged 90) Irvington, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Historian, biographer
Alma mater	Yale University University of Oxford

Robert Kinloch Massie III (January 5, 1929 – December 2, 2019) was an American historian and biographer. He devoted much of his career to studying the House of Romanov, Russia's imperial family from 1613 to 1917. Massie was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Peter the Great: His Life and World.

Biography

Massie was born in Versailles, Kentucky. He spent much of his youth in Nashville, Tennessee and studied United States and European history at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut and then at Oxford University in Great Britain (United Kingdom), the latter on a Rhodes Scholarship. Massie worked as a journalist for Newsweek news magazine from 1959 to 1962 before taking a position at the old Saturday Evening Post.

In 1967, before he and his family moved to France, Massie wrote and published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra, an authoritative biography of Tsar Nicholas II (1868–1918, reigned 1894–1917) and Alexandra of Hesse (1872–1918), the last Emperor and Empress of Russia. Massie's interest in the Russian Imperial Family of Romanov 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 and heir to the imperial throne, the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich. In 1971 the book was the basis for an Academy Award-winning biographical feature film with the same title, which starred Michael Jayston alongside Janet Suzman. 28 years later in 1995, in his book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, Massie updated the Nicholas and Alexandra historical biography with much newly discovered information following the opening of some Russian and Soviet archives after 73 years and the end of the Cold War with the opening of the Berlin Wall, the fall of communism in 1989 and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991. Their bodies and those of some of their children were later exhumed from unmarked hidden forest graves, identified from modern DNA evidence, and given a State and Church funeral by the new Russian Federation, before being interred in the restored Russian Orthodox cathedral at the Peter and Paul Fortress in in renamed St. Petersburg in 1998.

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 later won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Peter the Great: His Life and World. This biographical book inspired a 1986 NBC television network miniseries, Peter the Great, that won three Emmy Awards and starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave.

In the following years, Massie wrote a number of books, including the biography, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, published in 2011 about the Tsarina Catherine the Great (1729–1796, reigned 1762–1796).

From 1987 to 1991, Massie was President of the Authors Guild, and he served as an ex officio council member. While President of the Guild, he famously called on authors to boycott any store that refused to carry Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses because of threats from the Islamic /Muslim world.

Massie died from complications from Alzheimer's disease on December 2, 2019 at the age of 90.

Awards and honors

• Rhodes Scholarship
• 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, Peter the Great: His Life and World
• 2012 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, winner, Catherine the Great
• 2012 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, winner, Catherine the Great

Bibliography

• Nicholas and Alexandra: An Intimate Account of the Last of the Romanovs and the Fall of Imperial Russia (Athenum, 1967) by Robert K. Massie (also, Ballantine Books, 2000, ISBN 0-345-43831-0 and Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2005, ISBN 1-57912-433-X)
• Journey (Knopf, 1975) by Robert and Suzanne Massie, ISBN 0-394-49018-5
• Peter the Great: His Life and World (Knopf, 1980) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-394-50032-6 (also Ballantine Books, 1981, ISBN 0-345-29806-3 and Wings Books, 1991, ISBN 0-517-06483-9)
• Last Courts of Europe: Royal Family Album, 1860–1914 (Vendome Press, 1981) introductory text by Robert K. Massie; picture research and description by Jeffrey Finestone, ISBN 0-86565-015-2 (also Greenwich House/Crown Publishers, c1983, ISBN 0-517-41472-4)
• Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the coming of the Great War (Random House, c1991) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-394-52833-6 (also Ballantine Books, 1992, ISBN 0-345-37556-4)
• There's an Old Southern Saying: The Wit and Wisdom of Dan May (Crabby Keys Press, 1993) compiled by William May Stern, foreword by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-9638911-0-3
• The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (Random House, 1995) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-394-58048-6 and ISBN 0-679-43572-7
• Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (Balantine Books, 2004) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 0-345-40878-0 (also J. Cape, 2004, ISBN 0-224-04092-8)
• Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Random House, 2011) by Robert K. Massie, ISBN 978-0-679-45672-8

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • Booknotes interview with Massie on Dreadnought, March 8, 1992
• "How WWI was waged at sea deck" by John M. Taylor in The Washington Times. Review of Castles of Steel including brief biographical notes on Massie.
• Jiffynotes.com article Retrieved 11-Jan-2011