Robert Massie

Robert Kinlock Massie III is a distinguished historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has devoted much of his writing career to the House of Romanov, the royal family of Imperial Russia. Massie studied American history at Yale University and modern European history at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. He is the author of "Nicholas and Alexandria" (which remained on The New York Times best-seller list for 46 weeks, was translated into 14 languages, and made into an Academy Award-nominated film). Massie's interest in the Tsars family was triggered by the birth of his son, the Rev. Robert Kinloch Massie, born with hemophilia, a hereditary disease that also afflicted the last Tsars son, Alexei. Massie went on to earn the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for "Peter the Great: His Life and World." The book appeared on The New York Times best-seller list for five successive months and inspired a 1986 NBC mini-series that won three Emmy Awards (and starred Maximilian Schell, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave). Robert Massie addressed the student delegates at the 1985 Achievement Summit in Denver, Colorado on the topic of overcoming failure and ultimately reaching personal achievement and success.