A prolific author, Payne is best known for his biographies of prominent historical figures, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Hitler, Stalin, Karl Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong and Mahatma Gandhi, several of which were selected for Book of the Month Club.
[1] As a young man Payne worked as a shipwright in England and then at the Singapore Naval Base, where he transferred to Army Intelligence.
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.
[2] He became a US citizen in 1953 and settled in New York City in 1954, devoting himself to writing and shifting his focus in part from novels and poetry to biography.
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, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Sun Yat-sen, André Malraux, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, the White Rajahs of Sarawak and General George C.
[8] As a novelist, Payne used the pseudonyms Richard Cargoe, John Anthony Devon, Howard Horne, Valentin Tikhonov, and Robert Young.
[citation needed] World rights to all works by Payne are handled by David Higham Associates, London, U.K.[citation needed] Francis Ford Coppola, who was the co-screenwriter of the award-winning 1970 film Patton, lifted almost verbatim the last words of the film from the first paragraph of Payne's book The Roman Triumph, ending with the phrase, "all glory is fleeting."
[10] Payne was described in 1947 as "a poet and a believer in the permanent power of beauty", and as a "young English author whose versatility and prolific output have astonished the literary world".
[2] Orville Prescott, book reviewer for the New York Times, claimed that "No man alive can write more beautiful prose than Robert Payne.
[14] The Biography Book recognised the "narrative and imaginative power" of Payne's account, while stating that "it incorporates speculation as fact".