Life
Dominique Lapierre was born in Châtelaillon-Plage, Charente-Maritime, France. At the age of thirteen, he traveled to America with his father who was a diplomat (Consul General of France). He attended the Jesuit school in New Orleans and became a paper boy for the New Orleans Item. He developed interests in traveling, writing and cars.
Lapierre renovated a 1927 Nash that his mother gave him and decided to travel across America 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 hitchhiked throughout America 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 France and other European countries.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.”
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“This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)