A movie adaptation of The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened aired on NBC in 1977, starring Jimmie Walker and James Earl Jones.
He reviewed movies and theater for the NBC's Cleveland affiliate WKYC-TV in the late 1970s and early ’80s, as well as "won a following as a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is radio and TV talk show host."
Like John O'Hara, Robertson often linked novels that were not substantially related by including brief allusions to characters and events in his previous works.
[1] Set in Cleveland between 1944 and 1953, each of the three Morris Bird III novels revolves around a major event in the city's history: the East Ohio Gas explosion, the Indians winning the pennant, and the Korean War.
The Press Club of Cleveland's Hall of Fame inducted Robertson in 1992, and he received the Society of Professional Journalist's Life Achievement Award in 1995.
[1] After Robertson published his first novel, The Three Days, he was criticized by President Dwight Eisenhower for the obscene language used by the soldiers in the story.
[7] Reviewers compared Robertson's first three books - the Civil War trilogy (1959-1962) - to the works of Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, and J.D.
[9] Dennis Dooley describes Robertson thusly: "A battler who fought his way back, with the help of his wife Sherri, from a series of crushing health problems—two heart attacks in 1974, several strokes, lung cancer and the eventual loss of both legs to diabetes—Robertson liked to refer to the nine novels he published after 1974 as his "posthumous" books."
[...] "Wheelchair-bound but hard at work on another book (he relished a new software program that simulated the printed page), he told two departing fellow writers who had dropped by to see him shortly before his death, 'Hey, don’t forget me, you guys.