Is Paris Burning? reconstructs, in meticulous and riveting detail, the network of fateful events-day by day, moment by moment-that saved the City of Light.īestselling authors and renowned journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre spent three years researching this book, drawing on French Resistance radio messages, German military records, countless interviews, and secret correspondence between de Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. “When we started researching, we found an elaborate plot.“Is Paris burning?” is the question Hitler asked over and over as the French Second and American Fourth Divisions battered their way into the city.įew moments in history are as stirring as the Allied liberation of Paris, yet few people are aware of how narrowly-and how miraculously-the city escaped Hitler’s secret plan to reduce it to ashes. “Before then, hardly anyone knew of the threat Paris had faced and how narrowly it escaped,” he said.

He served in the Army, based at the Allied Headquarters in Paris, from 1953-1955, and met Lapierre during that time.Ĭollins told the AP last year that his idea for the book came only in 1962 after he saw an item in a London newspaper about Hitler’s obsession with obliterating the City of Light. He left the wire agency for Newsweek and was the magazine’s Paris bureau chief from 1961-1965. was a foreign correspondent for United Press International based in Paris, Rome, Cairo and Beirut in the 1950s. 14, 1929, in West Hartford, Conn., Larry J. Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal co-wrote the screenplay.īorn Sept. The book was made into a movie by French director Rene Clement in 1966 with French and American stars, including Charles Boyer, Kirk Douglas, Orson Welles and Glenn Ford, and became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. It recounted a story of Hitler’s plan to destroy the French capital should it fall into the hands of the Allies. “Is Paris Burning?,” published in 1964, has become a classic of the Nazi occupation of the French capital during World War II.

“There wasn’t the least bit of antagonism in 43 years,” Lapierre said, expressing his distress at the death of his writing partner. The two men wrote numerous books together during their four-decade-long collaboration, including “O Jerusalem,” published in 1971, and their last book, “Is New York Burning?,” published last year. He suffered the hemorrhage at his home in the small Riviera town of Ramatuelle and was taken to the hospital in nearby Frejus where he died, Lapierre said.Ĭollins’ death was initially announced by Action for Leprous Children of Calcutta, an association run by Lapierre. He was 75.Ĭollins died of a cerebral hemorrhage, co-author and neighbor Dominique Lapierre told The Associated Press. PARIS (AP) – Larry Collins, the American journalist who was co-author of the book “Is Paris Burning?,” died Monday.

Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins