Don Robertson

Don Robertson (March 21, 1929 – March 21, 1999) was an American novelist. He wrote 19 novels, one published posthumously.

Robertson is probably best known for his trio of novels featuring Morris Bird III: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, The Sum and Total of Now, and The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened. A movie adaptation of The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened aired on NBC in 1977, starring Jimmie Walker and James Earl Jones.

In April 2008, HarperCollins Publisher reissued The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread in paperback. Berkley Trade (a division of Penguin Books) reissued The Sum and Total of Now in August 2009, and HarperCollins Publisher reissued The Greatest Thing that Almost Happened in September 2009. The rest of Don Robertson's books are currently out of print. In 2016 the Italian editor Nicola Manuppelli started the Italian publication of Robertson's works with the publisher Nutrimenti, translating "The Ideal, Genuine Man" (Nutrimenti, 2016). A second novel by Robertson, "Praise the Human Season" will be translated by Nicola Manuppelli at the end of 2017. . In 2019, Nicola Manuppelli edited and translated an unpublished Don's novel "Julie" in Italy for Nutrimenti publisher. The novel is about the character Julie Sutton, known from others Don's works.

Awards A Flag Full of Stars (1964), set during the 1948 election of Harry Truman, won the Putnam Award. Robertson won the Cleveland Arts Prize for his Morris Bird books, in 1966. He won the Ohioana Book Award in fiction in 1988 for The Ideal, Genuine Man.The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature presented him with its Mark Twain Award in 1991. 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. Reviewers compared Robertson's first three books - the Civil War trilogy (1959-1962) - to the works of Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, and J.D. Salinger. The Dictionary of Midwestern Literature pronounced it Robertson's "most significant fictional accomplishment" and predicted the three-book saga was "likely to assume an important place in American boyhood fiction." In contrast, Robertson's later books were sometimes criticized for their violence and "sordid" tendencies.

Sportswriter Terry Pluto has said that, "Robertson made me believe I could become an author," after one of his high school teachers gave the 14 year-old Pluto a copy of The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, and telling the young boy that he could write books too.

Personal life and health 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 (sic) 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.'" He's buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in Logan, Ohio.

Novels A Civil War Trilogy: The Three Days (1959) By Antietam Creek (1960) The River and the Wilderness (published as Game Without Rules in the UK) (1962) A Flag Full of Stars (1964) The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (1965) The Sum and Total of Now (1966) Paradise Falls (1968) The Greatest Thing That Almost Happened (1970) Praise the Human Season (1974) Miss Margaret Ridpath and the Dismantling of the Universe (1977) Make a Wish (1978) Mystical Union (1978) Victoria at Nine (1979) Harv (1985) The Forest of Arden (1986) The Ideal, Genuine Man (1987) Barb (1988) Prisoners of Twilight (1989)