May 21, 2004
Reader’s Almanac: May 21
It’s the day of commercial fiction writers here at the almanac. Born today were Harold Robbins in New York City in 1916; Janet Dailey in Storm Lake, Iowa, in 1944; and satirist Al Franken in New York City in 1951.
In addition, today’s the day that romance writer Barbara Cartland died in London in 2000.
Harold Robbins was a man who lived life at the extremes, much like the characters in novels like “The Carpetbaggers” and “Dreams Die First.” He was abandoned on a church doorstep as an infant and raised in a Catholic orphanage on 10th Avenue in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City. During the Great Depression, he worked as a numbers runner, cook and errand boy, and while working at a grocery store, learned about the distribution business well enough to start his own company. By the time he was 21, he had earned a million dollars. He invested it all in sugar, but lost it when President Roosevelt froze prices below what he had paid.
Starting over again, he took a job in the shipping department at Universal Pictures’ New York office. He discovered that the company was being ripped off, investigated and exposed it, and was rewarded with a promotion to Hollywood. There, he came across a novel the studio had bought, read it, and told an executive that he would write a better one. The executive said, “So do it.” The result was Robbins’ first novel, “Never Love a Stranger,” which Alfred A. Knopf accepted and published in 1948. His third novel, “A Stone for Danny Fisher,” about a boxer who resisted bribes from gangsters, was praised by Life magazine. Even if Robbins never wrote another book, he would have “reserved for himself a small place in literature.” By the time he died, 750 million copies of his novels had been sold and read worldwide.
He had been called a hack, but he didn’t care. “So what else is new? Dickens wrote about what was happening to real people during the time he lived. I’m telling what happens to people in my lifetime. And you know something? It’s all the same thing. Exteriors may change, but people are the same. The same conflicts, the same passions. There’s not that much difference in the way people relate to each other. Look at David Copperfield and look at Danny Fisher. They’re very similar.”
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