Robert K. Massie

Robert Kinloch Massie is a highly respected American historian, writer, and Pulitzer Prize winner. Born in Versailles, Kentucky, Massie spent a significant portion of his youth in both Versailles and Nashville, Tennessee. He pursued his undergraduate studies in American history at Yale University and furthered his education in modern European history at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

Massie's career as a journalist began at Newsweek from 1959 to 1964, followed by a stint at the Saturday Evening Post. However, it was his family's move to France that served as the catalyst for his breakthrough book, Nicholas and Alexandra. This biography of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra of Hesse, and their family and cultural/political milieu, was inspired by Massie's personal experience as the father of a son, Robert Kinloch Massie, who also suffered from hemophilia, a disease that had afflicted the Tsar's son, Alexei. The book was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1971, and in 1995, Massie updated it with newly discovered information in The Romanovs: The Final Chapter.

In addition to his work on the Romanovs, Massie, along with his then-wife Suzanne, wrote Journey, a joint exploration of their experiences as parents of a hemophiliac child and the differences between the American and French healthcare systems. Massie won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1981 for his book Peter the Great: His Life and World, which inspired a 1986 NBC mini-series that won three Emmy Awards. Massie currently resides in Irvington, New York.