Larry Collins (writer)
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Larry Collins born John Lawrence Collins Jr., (September 14, 1929, Hartford, Connecticut – June 20, 2005, Fréjus, France), was an American writer.
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[edit] Life
Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, he was educated at the Loomis Chaffee Institute in Windsor, Connecticut, and graduated from Yale with 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 1953-1955, he met Dominique Lapierre with whom he would write several best-sellers over a period of 43 years.
He went back to Procter and Gamble and became the products manager of the newly formed foods division in 1955. Disillusioned with commerce, however, 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 the Newsweek magazine as their Middle East editor, based in New York. He later became the Paris Bureau Chief in 1961, where he would work until 1964, until he switched to writing books.
In 1965, Collins and Lapierre published their first joint work, titled Is Paris Burning?, a tale of Nazi occupation of the French capital during World War II, which told of Hitler's plans to destroy Paris should it fall into the hands of the Allies. The book was an instant classic, and was made into a movie in 1966 by director Rene Clement, starring Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford and Alain Delon.
In 1967, they co-authored Or I'll Dress you in Mourning about the famous Spanish bullfighter Manuel Benitez El Cordobes.
In 1972, after 5 years of intensive research and interviews, they published O Jerusalem! about the birth of Israel in 1948, which is now being turned into a movie by Elie Chouraqui.
In 1975, they published Freedom at Midnight, a story of the Indian Independence in 1947, and the subsequent assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. It is said that they spent over $300,000 researching this book, and still emerged wealthy men after the book was published.
The duo published their first fictional work together, The Fifth Horseman, in 1981, which describes a terrorist attack on New York masterminded by Libya's Colonel Gaddafi. The book had such a shocking effect that the French President cancelled the sale of nuclear reactors to Libya, even though it was meant for peaceful purposes. Paramount Pictures, which was planning to make a film based on the book, dropped the idea in the fear that some fanatics would try to emulate the scenario in real life. Little did they know that this prophetic book would, in fact, be enacted in real life by Al Qaeda.
In 1985, Collins authored the book Fall From Grace (this time without Lapierre) about a woman agent sent into occupied France who realizes that she may be betrayed by her British masters if it is strategically necessary. He also wrote Maze: A Novel (1989), Black Eagles (1995), Le Jour Du Miracle: D-Day Paris (1994) and Tomorrow Belongs To Us (1998). Shortly before his death, he again collaborated with Lapierre on Is New York Burning? (2005), a novel mixing fictional characters and real-life public figures that speculates about a possible terrorist attack on New York City.
In 2005, while working from his home in the south of France on a book on the Middle East, Collins died of a sudden cerebral haemorrhage.
[edit] Personal life
In 1966, Collins married Egyptian princess Nadia Sultan. They had two sons.
[edit] Awards
Collins won the Deauville film festival literary award in 1985, and the Mannesman Talley literary prize in 1989.
