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Harold Robbins summed up his career best in a 1971 ITV documentary: "I'm the world's best writer--there's nothing more to say". This phenomenally successful author--over 750,000,000 copies of his books were sold worldwide, and most were adapted successfully for the screen. At fifteen, he left home to begin a series of low-paying jobs, including working as a numbers runner. At twenty, after buying options on farmers' produce, Robbins was a millionaire, but a move into sugar futures wiped him out. He next took a job as a shipping clerk with Universal Pictures warehouse in New York and was soon promoted to executive director for budget and planning. On a bet with a studio executive, Robbins wrote his personal favorite novel, Never Love a Stranger (Knopf, 1948), and other early works which achieved minor critical success. He soon devolved into a writer of more popular novels involving celebrity, sex, and violence, to the scorn of critics. His writings after 1960 reflected his personal life: six marriages, wild Hollywood parties, drug abuse. A stroke in 1982 left him with aphasia, although he continued to write, publishing his last novel, Tycoon, in 1997.

Taking the surname of his last foster parents, he originally used the name Harold Rubin, which he later changed to Robbins.

He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6743 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on December 14, 1977.

Biography in: &quot;American National Biography&quot;. Supplement 1, pp. 516-517. New York: Oxford University Press (2002).

Resided at one time in <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0841797/?ref_=nmtrv_trv">Gloria Swanson</a>&#39;s former mansion.

He spent a great deal of time on the French Rivera and at Monte Carlo before his death in Palm Springs, California on October 14, 1997.

Following his death, his cremated remains were interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cathedral City, California.

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Harold Robbins

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