 White Dog , released in France as Chien Blanc , is a fictional autobiographical novel written by Romain Gary . Originally published as a short story in Life in 1970 ( 9 October ) , the full novel was published in 1970 in French in France by Éditions Gallimard . Gary 's English version of the novel was published in North America in the same year by New American Library . The novel provides a fictionalized account of Gary and his wife 's experiences in the 1960s with a stray Alabama police dog trained to attack black people on sight , and their attempts to have the dog <unk> . 
