Bangladesh, Dec. 3 -- Robert K. Massie, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who specialized in best-selling and critically praised biographies of the Russian tsars and discovered a personal connection to the country's past through the blood disorder that afflicted both his son and the son of Nicholas II, died Monday at age 90.

Son Christopher Massie told The Associated Press that the author, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease, died at his home in Irvington, New York.

Likened to David McCullough and Edmund Morris as a popularizer of history, Robert K. Massie wrote epic page turners on two outsized tsars: the 900-page "Peter the Great," winner of the Pulitzer in 1981; and the 600-page "Catherine the Great," winner in 2012 of...