Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (4 December 1911 – 3 March 1983), was a novelist, historian, poet, and biographer.

Born in Cornwall

Cornwall

Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...

, the son of an English naval architect, and with a French mother. He worked as a shipbuilder and then for a time with the Inland Revenue

Inland Revenue

The Inland Revenue was, until April 2005, a department of the British Government responsible for the collection of direct taxation, including income tax, national insurance contributions, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, corporation tax, petroleum revenue tax and stamp duty...

. In 1941 he became an armament officer and chief camouflage officer for British Army Intelligence at Singapore. In the summer of 1946, Payne traveled to China

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

 and visited with and interviewed Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

 in Yenan. During the interview Mao correctly predicted that it would only take the Communist forces

Communist Party of China

The Communist Party of China , also known as the Chinese Communist Party , is the founding and ruling political party of the People's Republic of China...

 a year and a half to conquer China once the armistice with Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....

 and his followers

Kuomintang

The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...

 was broken.

Payne had more than 110 books published, novels, histories and biographies. He was best known for the biographies, which included studies of Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin

Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...

, Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo , born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, was a Swedish film actress. Garbo was an international star and icon during Hollywood's silent and classic periods. Many of Garbo's films were sensational hits, and all but three were profitable...

, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer OM was a German theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary. He was born in Kaysersberg in the province of Alsace-Lorraine, at that time part of the German Empire...

, Dostoyevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek

Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....

, Karl Marx

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

, Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...

, Sun Yat-sen

Sun Yat-sen

Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese doctor, revolutionary and political leader. As the foremost pioneer of Nationalist China, Sun is frequently referred to as the "Father of the Nation" , a view agreed upon by both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China...

, André Malraux

André Malraux

André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...

, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, The White Rajahs of Sarawak

White Rajahs

White Rajahs refers to a dynasty that founded and ruled the Kingdom of Sarawak from 1841 to 1946, namely the Brookes, who came originally from England. A Rajah is a monarch in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.-Rulers:...

 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

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...

; the book was mostly Payne's writing, incorporating "fragmentary da Vinci notes."

Selected works

• Chungking Diary published by W. Heinemann (London, Toronto) (1945)(no ISBN)
• Mao Tse Tung Ruler of Red China (1950). Revised editions published as Portrait of a revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung (1961) and Mao Tse-tung (1969). All editions include an historical account of China from the Taiping Rebellion
  Taiping Rebellion
  The Taiping Rebellion was a widespread civil war in southern China from 1850 to 1864, led by heterodox Christian convert Hong Xiuquan, who, having received visions, maintained that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, against the ruling Manchu-led Qing Dynasty...
  
  , but are centered around Mao's life and philosophy
• The Wanton Nymph: A Study of Pride published by William Heinemann
  William Heinemann
  William Heinemann was the founder of the Heinemann publishing house in London.He was born in 1863, in Surbiton, Surrey. In his early life he wanted to be a musician, either as a performer or a composer, but, realising that he lacked the ability to be successful in that field, he took a job with...
  
  , Ltd. London (1951)(no ISBN)
• The Deluge, Twayne 1954 (as Leonardo da Vinci) (no ISBN)
• A House in Peking Doubleday (1956) (no ISBN)
• The Holy Fire: The Story of the Early Centuries of the Christian Church in the Near East Harper, New York (1957)(ISBN 913836-61-3)
• The Holy Sword Harper & Brothers (published in 1957; republished in 1987 under the title The History of Islam)
• The Three Worlds of Albert Schweitzer, Thomas Nelson & Sons, London, 1957
• The Gold of Troy
  Troy
  Troy was a city, both factual and legendary, located in northwest Anatolia in what is now Turkey, southeast of the Dardanelles and beside Mount Ida...
  
   - The story of Heinrich Schliemann and the buried cities of ancient Greece Funk & Wagnalls, NY (1959) Library of Congress catalog number 58-11361
• Hubris: A Study of Pride Harper Torch Books NY (1960) (no ISBN), with an introduction by Sir Herbert Read. Hubris is a revised paperback version of The Wanton Nymph: A Study of Pride.

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

• The Splendour of Greece published by Hale (London) (1961)(no ISBN)
• Lawrence of Arabia: a triumph published by Pyramid Books (1962)
• The Splendour of Israel Robert Hale, London (1963)
• The Triumph of the Greeks
  Greeks
  The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
  
   Hamish Hamilton, London (1964)
• The Life and Death of Lenin Simon and Schuster (1964) (no ISBN)
• Marx Simon and Schuster (1968)Library of Congress Catalog number 68-11014
• Caravaggio, A Novel, published by Little Brown and Company, 1968 Library of Congress number, 68-17272
• The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi
  Mahatma Gandhi
  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , pronounced . 2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948) was the pre-eminent political and ideological leader of India during the Indian independence movement...
  
  , E.P. Dutton, 1969
• Eyewitness: A Personal Account of a Tumultuous Decade, 1937-1946 Doubleday (1972) (no ISBN)
• The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler
  Adolf Hitler
  Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
  
   Praeger (1973) (no ISBN)

This biography is tremendously flawed. It is widely acknowledged that Payne relied on flawed sources -- including Bridget Dowling (Alois Hitler, Jr.'s Irish wife) for a completely fictional year spent in England. However, one reviewer on Amazon.com wrote: "in my opinion [it is] the most readable and enjoyable of the English-language biographies on that infamous tyrant.... It is of course undeniably true that there are several glaring errors in Payne's research on Hitler which were exposed by subsequent biographers; it is equally true that he relied very heavily on source material of dubious authenticity to fill in various gaps in Hitler's life. Payne devotes an entire chapter to Hitler's visit to England in the early 1900s, a visit which apparently never happened; he also writes extensively on secret negotiations between Germany and the USSR which supposedly took place in 1943 and which also may never have occurred. These mistakes (and others) are glaring and embarrassing, but readers would do well to remember that Payne was writing in 1968, long before the collapse of East Germany and the Soviet Union, and had much more restricted access to documents than did, for example, Ian Kershaw. He was also trying much harder to paint a picture of Adolf Hitler, the human being, than was Kershaw, Bullock, or Toland, who were more concerned with trying to weave Hitler's life into the fabric of his times - i.e. to tell the "whole story" of the Nazi era. It is in this last category - Hitler the person - that Payne succeeds where the others often falter. If his details occasionally stray into the erroneous, his reconstruction of Hitler's youth in Braunau and Linz, his self-imposed misery in Vienna, his life as a soldier during the Great War, and the tumultuous early days of the National Socialist movement are all brought to life with the vividness of a novel. Payne may only be a second-tier historian, but he has the gift, as does John Keegan, of using prose to elevate facts, figures, dates and events into the realms the dramatic. He brings to life in vivid terms the beer-hall brawls, the back-room deals, the raucous political rallies, and the frequent moments of despair which often gripped the movement as it struggled for power, never letting us lose sight of the man who was behind it all.... I would recommend it highly for people who are interested in achieving a personal understanding one of the most enigmatic and terrible men in history."

• The Corrupt Society: From Ancient Greece to Present-Day America Praeger (1975) ISBN 0-275-51020-4
• Ivan the Terrible co-authored with Nikita Romanoff Crowell-Collier
  Thomas Y. Crowell Co.
  Thomas Y. Crowell Co. was a publishing company founded by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1834 in the United States.-History:The company began publishing books in 1876, and in 1882 T. Irving Crowell joined his father in the business. Jeremiah Osborne Crowell became the sales manager.In 1909, after Thomas Y....
  
   (1975) ISBN 0690005822
• Leonardo, a 1978 biography of Leonardo da Vinci
  Leonardo da Vinci
  Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
  
   in which Payne asserts that the Mona Lisa
  Mona Lisa
  Mona Lisa is a portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a painting in oil on a poplar panel, completed circa 1503–1519...
  
   is a portrait of Isabella of Aragon
  Isabella of Aragon
  Isabella of Aragon , infanta of Aragon, was, by marriage, Queen consort of France in the Middle Ages from 1270 to 1271.-Life:...
  
  and that the traditional chalk self-portrait of da Vinci is actually a portrait of his father.
• The Dream and the Tomb Stein and Day (published posthumously in 1984)
• The Tortured and The Damned