His books, mixing journalism and historic reconstructions, offered greater than 50 million copies worldwide. They introduced Mr. Lapierre explicit acclaim in India for advanced portrayals of slum life in “City of Joy” (1985) in addition to his account of the Bhopal disaster, which was blamed for greater than 15,000 deaths and left 500,000 individuals stricken with extreme or continual well being issues.

He thought of himself a historian with a aptitude for vivid journalistic storytelling. “Is historical past a chunk of chilly cake that nobody can digest,” Mr. Lapierre advised India At present, “or is historical past a reenactment of what truly occurred with all of the feelings, smells, colours, impressions of occasions?”

He had a precocious literary begin, with the publication in 1950 of “Un Greenback les Mille Kilomètres” (“A Greenback for One Thousand Kilometers”), an account of touring in america. After a stint within the French navy, he landed a job on the journal Paris Match, the place he coated the Korean Conflict after which was a particular author and editor primarily based in Paris.

Mr. Lapierre’s work was infused closely with a correspondent’s instincts for storytelling: richly reported private tales and a mind for particulars — equivalent to how creator Ernest Hemingway arrange store in Paris after arriving with U.S. forces in 1944. Hemingway shortly took command of the bar on the “honeysuckle-covered” Hôtel du Grand Veneur, Mr. Lapierre wrote in “Is Paris Burning?” (1964) with co-author Larry Collins, of their account of the Nazi occupation of Paris and the Allied push into the town.

“Within the bar, [Hemingway] had put in a case of hand grenades, a carbine, a bottle of the grateful proprietor’s greatest cognac and a prewar Michelin street map,” Mr. Lapierre and Collins wrote within the ebook, which was made into an all-star 1966 movie by French filmmaker René Clément.

However Mr. Lapierre typically mentioned he most well-liked on-the-scene reporting slightly than wanting again as a historian. In his 1991 ebook on the AIDS disaster, “Beyond Love,” Mr. Lapierre spent months with individuals by the illness and adopted scientists and well being groups.

For “5 Previous Midnight in Bhopal,” written with Javier Moro and first revealed in French in 1997, Mr. Lapierre spent three years observing the lives of households dwelling close to the Union Carbide plant, the place a December 1984 leak of a extremely poisonous fuel used for pesticides, methyl isocyanate, turned one of many world’s most threatening industrial disasters.

The ebook, launched in English in 2001, doesn’t discover the chemical catastrophe till the final chapter. The tales from the shantytowns are already poignant of their desperation. “The outcome reads like a thriller, albeit one whose terrifying final result is thought from the outset,” journalist Birte Twisselmann wrote in an essay for the medical commerce journal BMJ.

Mr. Lapierre’s subjects ranged far, and included exploring South Africa’s historical past of apartheid in “A Rainbow in the Night” (2008) and the Israel-Palestinian battle in “O Jerusalem!” (1971) with Collins as co-author. His skilled and private pursuits, nonetheless, have been most carefully bonded with India. “A love story,” he as soon as referred to as his connections to the nation.

Mr. Lapierre and his spouse funded humanitarian initiatives, together with houses for individuals with leprosy and clinics in India’s West Bengal area and round Bhopal.

His 1975 ebook “Freedom at Midnight” (with Collins as co-author) revisited the 1947 partition of the subcontinent after British rule. One other main work got here from almost three years dwelling for varied stretches in Anand Nagar, or “the Metropolis of Pleasure,” a teeming slum within the coronary heart of Kolkata (then broadly often called Calcutta).

“The Metropolis of Pleasure” (1985) vividly chronicles the grinding poverty and endless hardships in a slum whose incongruous title was coined by jute makers looking for to draw employees. But Mr. Lapierre discovered inspiration, too, within the generosity amid the squalor, equivalent to households taking in orphans or tending to these with tuberculosis, dysentery and different illnesses.

The Washington Put up’s then New Delhi-based correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller wrote on the time that Mr. Lapierre “generally over-romanticizes the battle of the poor” and presumably took broad liberties in translated feedback. “It’s actually uncommon to listen to somebody who buys blood from the poor of Calcutta exclaim, ‘Holy mackerel!’” she wrote.

However Bumiller additionally gave Mr. Lapierre excessive marks for humanity and empathy.

“‘The Metropolis of Pleasure’ is filled with primary truths,” she wrote. “A few of its moments might stick with a reader ceaselessly. Who can neglect the dying rickshaw puller promoting his bones to a person who makes cash from exporting skeletons, or the poor of Calcutta washing the physique of a pal, and weeping through the riverbank cremation ceremony?”

Mr. Lapierre pledged to assist support teams in Kolkata with half his royalties from the ebook, which was made right into a 1992 movie starring Patrick Swayze. Mr. Lapierre mentioned he carried a thumb-bell utilized by a rickshaw puller to remind him of the slum — however after a number of weeks sleeping on a mud ground within the residence of a Polish priest, he mentioned he would verify right into a five-star lodge.

“Three days of bubble baths,” he advised the Related Press in 1985, “and a style of scotch.”

Dominique Lapierre was born July 30, 1931, in Châtelaillon-Plage, France, on the Bay of Biscay, right into a household that kindled his lifelong curiosity in journey and writing. His mom was a journalist, and his father was a French diplomat who introduced Mr. Lapierre to New Orleans as a young person throughout a posting as consul basic.

In Louisiana, Mr. Lapierre attended college and developed a love for automobiles and the open street. He later hitchhiked and traveled throughout america — adventures he included into his first ebook when he was 19.

Mr. Lapierre graduated in 1952 from Lafayette School in Easton, Pa., and acquired a 1937 Chrysler convertible for $30. He and his first spouse, Aliette Spitzer, took a road-trip honeymoon, driving the automobile to Mexico after which Los Angeles, the place they received $300 on a radio sport present after they have been virtually out of cash.

Mr. Lapierre offered the Chrysler, they usually booked passage on a ship to Japan, and finally labored their approach throughout Asia and the Center East. The travels have been was his second ebook, “Honeymoon Across the World,” first revealed in French in 1953 and in English in 1957.

Mr. Lapierre was conscripted into the French military, serving as an interpreter with Allied forces in Belgium. There, he met Collins, an American corporal, who took a job with the United Press information company in Paris after his discharge. Mr. Lapierre was with Paris Match. They determined to attempt their hand at one thing larger — a ebook in regards to the liberation of Paris.

Its business success led them to the subsequent challenge, “O Jerusalem!,” in regards to the start of the state of Israel, which was tailored right into a 2006 film. In 1980, they collaborated on a novel, “The Fifth Horseman,” a few Libyan terrorist plotting to detonate a hydrogen bomb in New York. (Collins died in 2005.)

Mr. Lapierre married Conchon-Lapierre in 1980. Along with his spouse, survivors embrace a daughter, Alexandra, from his first marriage. Full info on survivors was not instantly out there.

Mr. Lapierre as soon as mentioned his curiosity was so expansive that he would want “10 incarnations” of life to completely discover the world.

“I like the concept that the world by no means stops,” he mentioned, “that you’re by no means bored.”