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1961 bestselling novel by Harold Robbins
the Harold Robbins novel

The Carpetbaggers is a 1961 bestselling novel by Harold Robbins, which was adapted into a 1964 film of the same title. The prequel Nevada Smith (1966) was also based on a character in the novel. In the United States, the term "carpetbagger" refers to an outsider relocating to exploit locals. It derives from postbellum Southern United States usage, where it referred specifically to opportunistic Northerners who flocked to the occupied southern states in hopes of increasing their political, financial and social power during the Reconstruction era. In Robbins' novel, the exploited territory is the film industry, and the newcomer is a wealthy heir to an industrial fortune who, like Howard Hughes, simultaneously pursued aviation and filmmaking avocations.

Murray Schumach's review in The New York Times on June 25, 1961, opens: "It was not quite proper to have printed The Carpetbaggers between covers of a book. It should have been inscribed on the walls of a public lavatory." He complains that the plot is merely "an excuse for a collection of monotonous episodes about normal and abnormal sex—and violence ranging from simple battery to gruesome varieties of murder". On the day the review was published, The Carpetbaggers was already at number nine on the New York Times bestseller list. The most successful of Robbins' books, it had sold over eight million copies by 2004. The profile of Robbins in Gale's Contemporary Authors Online claims that The Carpetbaggers "is estimated to be the fourth most read book in history".

The Carpetbaggers was published at the onset of the sexual revolution. Only two years earlier, the U. S. Postmaster General had banned D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover from the mails as obscene. In 1960, publisher Grove Press won the Supreme Court case contesting the ban, but even in 1961 booksellers all over the country were sued for selling Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Parker quotes a professor of English as saying "The Carpetbaggers could have sent any retailer handling it to prison before 1960." The Carpetbaggers never landed in court, but it did vigorously (and profitably) exploit the territory that Grove Press had opened up. On the second page of the novel, as aviator Jonas Cord approaches the landing strip of his father's explosives factory, Robbins writes: "The black roof of the plant lay on the white sand like a girl on the white sheets of a bed, the dark pubic patch of her whispering its invitation into the dimness of the night." In 1961, this was explosive indeed. (Paradoxically, the words "pubic patch" are omitted in some recent editions published in the United Kingdom.) In 1963, while it may have been just within bounds in the United States, it was still one of 188 books prohibited from import into Australia, along with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, and no fewer than seven books by Henry Miller.

In the film The Fortune Cookie (1966), Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) carries a hardcover copy of the novel into his bedroom. Insurance investigators are covertly listening. In the novel The Outsiders (1967), Ponyboy Curtis mentions that his elder brother Darry has a copy of the novel, which Ponyboy states he has read, despite Darry saying he is too young.