Pierre Stephen Robert Payne

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

Born in Cornwall, 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. 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 and visited with and interviewed Mao Zedong in Yenan. During the interview Mao correctly predicted that it would only take the Communist forces a year and a half to conquer China once the armistice with the Chiang Kai-shek and his followers was broken^[1].

Payne had more than 110 books published, novels, histories and biographies. He was best known for the biographies, which included studies of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Dostoyevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Sun Yat-sen, André Malraux, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, The White Rajahs of Sarawak and George C. Marshall.

As a novelist, Payne used the pseudonyms Richard Cargoe, John Anthony Devon, Howard Horne, Valentin Tikhonov, and Robert Young. In his biographies, he appears as Robert Payne rather than Pierre Stephen Robert Payne.

[edit] Selected works

• 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 includes an historical account of China from the Taiping rebellion, but are centered around Mao's life and philosophy
• The Wanton Nymph: A Study of Pride published by William Heinemann, Ltd. London (1951)(no ISBN)
• 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

• A House in Peking Doubleday (1956) (no ISBN)
• The Holy Sword Harper & Brothers (published in 1957; republished in 1987 under the title The History of Islam)
• The Gold of Troy - The story of Heinrich Schliemann and the buried cities of ancient Greece Funk & Wagnalls, NY (1959) Library of Congress catalog number 58-11361
• The Splendour of Israel Robert Hale, London (1963)
• The Triumph of the Greeks Hamish Hamilton, London (1964)
• The Life and Death of Lenin Simon and Schuster (1964) (no ISBN)
• Eyewitness: A Personal Account of a Tumultuous Decade, 1937-1946 Doubleday (1972) (no ISBN)
• The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler Praeger (1973) (no ISBN)
• Ivan the Terrible co-authored with Nikita Romanoff Crowell-Collier (1975) ISBN 0690005822
• Leonardo, a 1978 biography of Leonardo da Vinci in which Payne asserts that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of Isabella of Aragon 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)

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