PARIS (AP) – Larry Collins, the American journalist who was co-author of the book “Is Paris Burning?,” died Monday. He was 75.

Collins died of a cerebral hemorrhage, co-author and neighbor Dominique Lapierre told The Associated Press. 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.

Collins’ death was initially announced by Action for Leprous Children of Calcutta, an association run by Lapierre. 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.

“There wasn’t the least bit of antagonism in 43 years,” Lapierre said, expressing his distress at the death of his writing partner.

“Is Paris Burning?,” published in 1964, has become a classic of the Nazi occupation of the French capital during World War II.

It recounted a story of Hitler’s plan to destroy the French capital should it fall into the hands of the Allies. 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. Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal co-wrote the screenplay.

Born Sept. 14, 1929, in West Hartford, Conn., Larry J. Collins Jr. was a foreign correspondent for United Press International based in Paris, Rome, Cairo and Beirut in the 1950s.

He left the wire agency for Newsweek and was the magazine’s Paris bureau chief from 1961-1965.

He served in the Army, based at the Allied Headquarters in Paris, from 1953-1955, and met Lapierre during that time.

Collins 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.

“Before then, hardly anyone knew of the threat Paris had faced and how narrowly it escaped,” he said. “When we started researching, we found an elaborate plot.”

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