It was purely personal research at first: He wanted to know more about the bleeding disease of hemophilia and how he and his wife at the time, Suzanne Massie, who became a noted Russian scholar, could help their hemophiliac son, Bob.ĭuring his research he became fascinated with perhaps the most famous childhood case of hemophilia, that of Alexei, a son of Nicholas and Alexandra. Massie said his literary odyssey was set in motion by research he did at the New York Public Library during lunch breaks from his job as a young journalist. He also produced two naval histories of World War I that bristled with drama. He wrote a book addressing the puzzles that arose after the skeletons of Nicholas and Alexandra, the last royal rulers of Russia, were discovered, along with those of family members, in Siberia in the 1990s.

She continued, “The narrative perspective he establishes and maintains, a vision tightly aligned with that of his subject, convinces a reader he’s not so much looking at Catherine the Great as he is out of her eyes.” Massie in reviewing “Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman” (2011) in The New York Times Book Review. “He understands plot - fate - as a function of character,” the novelist Kathryn Harrison wrote of Mr. One was even grist for Hollywood: “Nicholas and Alexandra” (1967) was adapted into a film of the same title in 1971. Massie captivated audiences with detailed accounts that read to many like engrossing novels. In monumental biographies of Peter the Great (1672-1725), Catherine the Great (1729-96) and Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra, who were assassinated with their five children and others in 1918, Mr. The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, the literary agent Deborah Karl. Massie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who wrote gripping, tautly narrated and immensely popular books on giants of Russian history, died on Monday at his home in Irvington, N.Y.

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