Catherine the Great

Robert Kinloch Massie III (1929-) 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. Massie was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He 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 he wrote and published his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra.

Massie was the president of the Authors Guild from 1987 to 1991, and he still serves as a 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. His title Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012.

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