Larry Collins (writer)

Larry Collins, born John Lawrence Collins Jr., (September 14, 1929, Hartford, Connecticut – June 20, 2005, Fréjus, France), was an American writer.

Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, he was educated at the Loomis Chaffee Institute in Windsor, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale as a BA in 1951. He worked in the advertising department of Procter and Gamble, in Cincinnati, Ohio, before being conscripted into the US Army. While serving in the public affairs office of the Allied Headquarters in Paris, from 1953 to 1955, he met Dominique Lapierre with whom he would write several best-sellers over 43 years.

He went back to Procter and Gamble and became the products manager of the new foods division in 1955. Disillusioned with commerce, he took to journalism and joined the Paris bureau of United Press International in 1956, and became the news editor in Rome in the following year, and later the MidEast bureau chief in Beirut.

In 1959, he joined Newsweek as Middle East editor, based in New York City. He became the Paris bureau chief in 1961, where he would work until 1964, until he switched to writing books.

In 1965, Collins and Dominique Lapierre published their first joint work, Is Paris Burning? (in French Paris brûle-t-il?), a tale of Nazi occupation of the French capital during World War II and Hitler's plans to destroy Paris should it fall into the hands of the Allies. The book was an instant success and was made into a movie in 1966 by director René Clément, starring Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford and Alain Delon.

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