Word: morel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hero seemed unlikely enough-an obsessed French dentist named Morel with a passion for elephants. The creation of French Novelist Romain Gary, in his novel The Roots of Heaven, Morel had brooded in a Nazi concentration camp, conceived such a blazing reverence for life that, once freed, he took off for Darkest Africa to become a self-appointed protector of wild beasts threatened with extermination by onrushing civilization...
Living Character. Shortly after Gary's novel first came out in France in 1956, Gary had a long letter from a game warden living in the Ivory Coast territory of French West Africa. Raphael Matta, a Frenchman of Italian descent, seemed Morel sprung to uncanny life-though Gary and Matta had never met or heard the other's name. Like Morel, Matta had undergone a shattering World War II experience. An exploding land mine almost took his life, and left him totally deaf...