Robert K. Massie

Robert K. Massie is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning writer and historian, known for his devotion to studying the House of Romanov, the ruling Russian dynasty from 1613 and 1917.

Massie was born in Lexington, Kentucky, but spent most of his childhood in Nashville, Tennessee. He studied U.S. history at Yale University, and European history at Oxford University while on a Rhodes Scholarship.

After graduating, Massie worked as a journalist for Newsweek from 1959 to 1962, when he left for a position at the Saturday Evening Post.

After his first son was born with hemophilia, Robert Massie's interest in the Russian Imperial Family was sparked, particularly because Nicholas II's son was born with the same disease. In 1967, Nicholas and Alexandra, a biography of Nicholas II and Alexandra of Hesse, the last Emperor and Empress of Russia, was published. The book was later adapted into an Academy Award-winning film of the same name.

In 1975, Robert Massie and his then-wife released Journey, a book chronicling the experiences they had as parents of a child with hemophilia and the difference between the American and French health care system.

Massie released Peter the Great: His Life and World in 1980, for which he won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. The book inspired the 1986 NBC miniseries Peter the Great, which won three Emmy Awards.

Massie went on to publish several more books including: Last Courts of Europe: Royal Family Album 1860-1914; Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the coming of the Great War; There's an Old Southern Saying: The Wit and Wisdom of Dan May; The Romanovs: The Final Chapter; Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea; and Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman.