Robert Payne (author)

For other people named Robert Payne, see Robert Payne (disambiguation).

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (4 December 1911 – 3 March 1983) was a professor of English literature, lecturer in naval architecture, novelist, historian, poet and biographer. Born at Saltash, Cornwall, Payne was the son of an English naval architect and a French mother.[1]

Career

Payne worked as a shipbuilder and then for a time with the Inland Revenue. In 1937, Payne met Adolf Hitler in Munich through Rudolf Hess, an incident which Payne describes in his book Eyewitness.[1] In 1941 he became an armament officer and chief camouflage officer for British Army Intelligence at Singapore. Driven out of Singapore by Japanese forces, he ended up first in Chungking and then in Kunming, in both of which places he kept extensive diaries which were published in 1945. In Kunming he was a close friend of the influential intellectual Wen Yiduo who was assassinated by Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang. Between 1943 and 1946 Payne taught naval architecture at Lianda University in China.[1]

In 1946, Payne met and interviewed Mao Zedong in Yenan. During the interview Mao correctly predicted that it would only take the Communist forces a year and a half to conquer China once the armistice with Chiang Kai-shek and his followers was broken.[2] Between 1949 and 1954 Payne was a professor of English literature at the University of Montevallo in the United States.[1]

Works

Payne had more than 110 books published, including novels, histories and biographies. He was best known for the biographies, which included studies of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Chiang Kai-shek, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Sun Yat-sen, André Malraux, William Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, the White Rajahs of Sarawak and George C. Marshall.

As a novelist, Payne used the pseudonyms Richard Cargoe, John Anthony Devon, Howard Horne, Valentin Tikhonov, and Robert Young. For his biographies, he wrote under the name "Robert Payne." In 1954, he published a pastiche novella, The Deluge, as Leonardo da Vinci; the book was mostly Payne's writing, incorporating "fragmentary da Vinci notes."[3]

One of Payne's better-known works is The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (1973). This biography is now perceived to be tremendously flawed. It is widely acknowledged that Payne uncritically accepted unreliable sources—including Bridget Dowling (Hitler's sister-in-law) for a completely fictional year spent in Liverpool, England.[4] However at this time, Dowling's claims regarding this non-existent visit had been under-researched, and even the well-known Hitler biographer Alan Bullock was unaware that they were false.[5]

Bibliography

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Biographies

Novels

History

The Dream and the Tomb A history of the Crusades. Cooper Square Press, originally published New York: Stein and Day.

Other works

Walter Kaufmann footnotes Hubris in his book Tragedy and Philosophy. He wrote that Few have crowded as many popular misconceptions about Aeschylus and Sophocles into as few pages as has Robert Payne in Hubris: A Study of Pride (1960), 20-31, p.63

References

Notes
  1. 1 2 3 4 "Robert Payne Collection". Robert Payne biography. Stony Brook University. Retrieved 6 November 2015.
  2. ↑ Halberstam The Coldest Winter, pp.233-34.
  3. ↑ "Recommended Reading," F&SF, September 1954, p.93.
  4. ↑ Brigitte Hamann, Hans Mommsen, Hitler's Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant As a Young Man, 2010, Tauris Parke, p.198.
  5. ↑ Alan Bullock, "Hitler à la Mode", New York Review of Books, June 28, 1973.
  6. ↑ Andy Croft,Red letter days : British fiction in the 1930s London : Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. ISBN 978-0-85315-729-8. 1990. (p.228)
  7. ↑ Robert Payne Collection
Bibliography
  • Halberstam, David (2007). The Coldest WInter - America and the Korean War. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 978-1-4013-0052-4. 
Web

External links

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