[2] His father, Kyle Crichton, was a writer/editor for Collier's magazine with experience as a coal miner and steel worker; he wrote novels and biographies (including a biography of the Marx Brothers) and also wrote for the communist publications The New Masses and the Daily Worker using the name Robert Forsythe, publishing a collection of articles that was entitled Redder Than the Rose.
Before returning to the United States, he managed an ice cream factory on the outskirts of Paris; it was, he said, his decompression chamber.
The New York Times critic Orville Prescott wrote: "If I had my way the publication of Robert Crichton's brilliant novel...would be celebrated with fanfares of trumpets, with the display of banners and with festivals in the streets."
Set in an Italian hill-town and telling the story of local resistance to the Nazis during World War II, the novel was adapted into a Golden Globe-winning movie of the same name by Stanley Kramer in 1969, featuring Anthony Quinn.
Crichton's second and last novel, The Camerons, published by Knopf in 1972, was adapted from the lives of his great-grandparents, a Scottish coal mining family.