Robert Payne (author)

Pierre Stephen Robert Payne (1911 – 1983) was an English-born author, known principally for works of biography and history, although he also wrote novels, poetry, magazine articles and many other works. After working in Singapore and China, he moved to the United States in 1946 and became a professor of English literature. From 1954 onwards he lived as a writer in New York.

A prolific author, Payne is best known for his biographies of prominent historical figures, such as Hitler, Stalin, Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong and Gandhi, several of which were selected for Book of the Month Club. These works are praised for their readability and literary power, although not always for their historical rigour.

Payne was born on 4 December 1911 at Saltash, Cornwall. He was the son of Stephen Payne, an English naval architect, and Mireille Louise Antonia (Dorey) Payne, originally from France. He was educated at St. Paul's School in London, the Diocesan College at Rondebosch and the University of Cape Town in South Africa, the universities of Liverpool and Munich, and the Sorbonne.

As a young man Payne worked as a shipwright, in England and then at the Singapore Naval Base, where he transferred to Army Intelligence. He worked in China between 1941 and 1946, as cultural attaché to the British Embassy and as a teacher at Fuhtan University at Chungking and at Lianda University, Kunming. While in China he became a friend of Joseph Needham. In 1946, Payne met and interviewed Mao Zedong in Yenan, providing background for his 1950 work Mao Tse-tung: Ruler of Red China. During the interview, Mao correctly predicted that it would take only a year and half for the Communist forces to conquer China after the armistice with Chiang Kai-shek and his followers was broken.

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