Don Robertson

Who was Don Robertson?

Don Robertson was an American novelist.

Robertson was born in Cleveland, Ohio and attended East High School. He briefly attended Harvard and Western Reserve University before working as a reporter and columnist for The Plain Dealer, the Cleveland News and the Cleveland Press.

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.

Most of Robertson's novels were set in Ohio, and the fictional town of Paradise Falls, Ohio, figured in many of them. Paradise Falls was also the title of one of his longest novels. Much of his fiction was set in the recent past, or a few generations past. His 1964 novel A Flag Full of Stars, for instance, was set during the 1948 U.S. elections. Like John O'Hara, he often linked novels that were not substantially related by including brief allusions to characters and events in his previous works.

In 1987, Stephen King’s Philtrum Press published Robertson’s novel, The Ideal, Genuine Man.