Lapierre donated most of his royalties from ‘City of Joy’ to humanitarian projects in India (File)
Marseilles:
Dominique Lapierre, a French author with a passion for India and whose novels have sold tens of millions of copies, has passed away, his wife announced. “At 91, he died of old age,” Dominique Conchon-Lapierre told French newspaper Var-Matin on Sunday. She added that she is “at peace and serene since Dominique is no longer suffering.”
Born on July 30, 1931 in Chatelaillon, Lapierre has sold about 50 million copies of the six books he co-wrote with American writer Larry Collins – the most famous being “Is Paris Burning?”
Published in 1965, the non-fiction book chronicles the events leading up to August 1944, when Nazi Germany surrendered control of the French capital, and was adapted for the silver screen by Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal.
His 1985 novel “City of Joy” – about the hardships of a rickshaw puller in Kolkata – was also a huge success. A movie based on it was released in 1992, starring Patrick Swayze and directed by Roland Joffe.
Lapierre donated most of his “City of Joy” royalties to support humanitarian projects in India.
In 2005, he said that thanks to this move, as well as donations from readers, “it became possible in 24 years to cure one million tuberculosis patients (and) care for 9,000 children with leprosy”.
After “Is Paris Burning?”, he continues his fruitful collaboration with Collins.
The duo wrote “Or I’ll Dress You in Mourning” (1968), “O Jerusalem” (1972), “Freedom at Midnight” (1975), “The Fifth Horseman” (1980) and the thriller “Is New York Burning ?”
For a long time, Lapierre lived near Collins in Saint-Tropez, their residences separated by a tennis court.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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