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4. Milton (Paradise Lost)
5. Georges Lemaître (Revue des questions scientifiques, November 1931)
Biographical notes
Pierre François Marie-Louis Boulle (1912–1994) was born in Avignon on 20 February 1912. After obtaining an engineering degree from the École supérieure d’électricité in Paris, he moved to Malaya and began working on British rubber plantations.
Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Boulle enlisted with the French army in Indochina. In 1941, he became a secret agent, working on behalf of the Free French mission in Singapore. Operating under the false identity of English citizen Peter John Rule, he aided the resistance movement in China, Burma and French Indochina. He was captured by Vichy France loyalists in 1943 and sentenced to hard labour for life, although he later escaped. Boulle was later made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur and decorated with the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance for his actions.
In 1949 Boulle returned to Paris and turned his hand to writing. He achieved his first major success with The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) which was a fictionalised account of prisoners of war who were forced to build a bridge in Thailand. The book quickly became a worldwide bestseller and its film adaptation won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, in 1957. Today, Boulle is also remembered for his dystopian novel, Planet of the Apes (1963), which imagined a planet where humans were treated like animals by their intellectual superiors, apes. This book was also successfully adapted into an Oscar-winning film, followed by several other film adaptations and sequels, a television series and comic book series.
Boulle continued to write for the rest of his life, publishing works of non-fiction based on his wartime experiences in addition to numerous novels and short stories. He died in Paris at the age of eighty-one.
Dr David Carter has taught at St. Andrews and Southampton universities in the UK and has been Professor of Communicative English at Yonsei University, Seoul. He now works freelance as a writer, journalist and translator. He has published books on psychoanalysis, literature, literary theory, drama, film history and applied linguistics. For Hesperus he has translated Georges Simenon’s Three Crimes, Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine, Klaus Mann’s Alexander, and works by the Marquis de Sade and Sigmund Freud. He has also written volumes in the Hesperus Brief Lives series on de Sade, Balzac and Freud. His most recent book, How to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a tongue-in-cheek guide for would-be Nobel laureates.
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