Robert Bloch
Novelist
An American author of horror and suspense fiction, he is best known for his novel, Psycho, which inspired the their Hitchcock film. He won both the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award.
He wrote his first story at age seventeen and, encouraged by his mentor, HP Lovecraft, published numerous stories in pulp magazines.
Over the course of his prolific writing career, he published over thirty novels, hundreds of short stories, and a number of television scripts.
He grew up in a German-Jewish family in the Midwestern United States and was the son of a banker and a social worker. He was married twice; he wed his second wife, Eleanor Alexander Zalisko, in 1964.
He was a close friend of fellow author, Harlan Ellison.