Pierre Boulle was born in 1912 at Avignon. Boulle spent the Second World War fighting in Yunnan, Calcutta and Indo-Chine, where he was captured by the Japanese. After the war he lived in Malaya, the Cameroons and, finally, Paris, where he settled until his death in 1994.
A scintillating mix of sci-fi adventure and allegory * Los Angeles Times * In 1963, at the most glacial moment of the Cold War, Frenchman Pierre Boulle wrote a novel called Planet Of The Apes - a drastic warning about where mankind's apparent desire to destroy itself might lead * The Mirror * Boulle called on his own experiences as a prisoner of war in South-east Asia during the Second World War, using the relationship between man and apes as a metaphor for the treatment handed out to prisoners by brutish Japanese guards * Daily Express * It's like a good myth or fairy-tale that stays with you... Part of the strength of this material is its disruptive, questioning nature. Who came first? Where are we going? The subtext is strongly anti-slavery, anti-racist and anti-war * Observer *