Biography

Dominique Lapierre (30 July 1931 – 2 December 2022) was a French author.

Dominique Lapierre was born in Châtelaillon-Plage, Charente-Maritime, . At the age of thirteen, he travelled to the U.S. with his father who was a diplomat (Consul General of ). He attended the Jesuit school in New Orleans and became a paper boy for the New Orleans Item. He developed interests in travelling, writing, and cars.

Lapierre renovated a 1927 Nash that his mother gave him and decided to travel across the United States during his summer holidays. To earn his way he painted mail boxes. Later, he received a scholarship to study the Aztec civilization in Mexico. He hitch-hiked throughout the U.S. living an adventurous existence, wrote articles, washed windows in churches, gave lectures, and even found a job as a siren cleaner on a boat returning to Europe. One day a truck driver who picked him up on the road to Chicago stole his suitcase. He found the driver before the police did. The Chicago Tribune paid him $100 for his exclusive story. His twenty thousand miles of adventure beginning with just thirty dollars in his pocket led to his first book A Dollar for a Thousand kilometers. It became one of the best sellers of postwar and other European countries.

When Lapierre was eighteen, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to study economics at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he was graduated in 1952. That year he bought a 1937 Chrysler convertible for $30 and fell in love with a fashion editor. They were married in New York City Hall on his 21st birthday and drove to Mexico in the old Chrysler for their honeymoon. With only $300 in their pockets, they had just enough to buy gas, sandwiches, and cheap rooms in truckers’ motels. In Los Angeles, they won another $300 in a radio game show for Campbell Soup. The prize included a case of soup, which was their only food for three weeks. Lapierre sold the Chrysler for $400 in San Francisco and bought two tickets on the SS President Cleveland for Japan. The honeymoon lasted for a year. They worked their way across Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Lebanon. When they returned to , Lapierre wrote his second book, Honeymoon around the Earth. ...

Source: Article "Dominique Lapierre" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.