Harold Lamb

Harold Lamb wrote popular histories of the Mongols and the crusades that reached readers no academic monograph ever would, and then wrote screenplays for Cecil B. DeMille. He was born in Alpine, New Jersey, into a family of artists, was short-sighted and slightly deaf, and read his way into the steppe: he learned enough Persian, Arabic and Turkish to work with sources at a time when few English-speaking popularisers bothered. He began in the pulp magazines, writing adventure fiction about Cossacks and Central Asia for Adventure, and moved to biography with Genghis Khan: The Emperor of All Men in 1927, which sold enormously and stayed in print for decades. Tamerlane, Omar Khayyam, The Crusades and a two-volume history of Russia followed. His histories are narrative rather than analytical, they take the Mongol and Muslim sides seriously at a period when English writing on both was routinely contemptuous, and they are the reason a generation of readers and several later historians took up the subject at all. He worked for the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War on the Middle East. In Hollywood he wrote or advised on The Crusades, The Plainsman and Samson and Delilah. Scholarship has moved a long way past him and he is still recommended as a way in. He read at least a dozen languages by his own account and rather fewer by other people's. His narrative method - the Mongols as protagonists with their own reasons rather than as a catastrophe that befell civilisation - was unusual in English in the 1920s and is now standard. Several later medievalists have said in print that they started with him.

• Lived: 1892 CE – 1962 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: writer