Harold Robbins was an American author.

Robbins, born Harold Rubin in New York City, claimed to be a Jewish orphan raised in a Catholic boys home but in actual fact, he was the son of well-educated Russian and Polish immigrants. He was reared by his pharmacist father and stepmother in Brooklyn. And his first wife wasn't a Chinese dancer who died from a parrot bite as he had also claimed. She was in fact merely his high school sweetheart