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The Little Prince
A stranded pilot meets a boy from asteroid B-612 whose journey among grown-up planets becomes a parable of seeing with the heart.
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About
A pilot whose plane has broken down in the Sahara suddenly meets a strange little boy who asks him to draw a sheep. The boy is a little prince from an asteroid no bigger than a house—named B-612—and before reaching Earth he has visited other planets: a king who rules no one, a vain man hungry for admiration, a drunkard, a businessman who counts the stars in order to own them, a lamplighter who endlessly lights and extinguishes his lamp, and a geographer who has never left his library. Each planet is an ironic image of one of the obsessions of grown-ups.
Context and Composition
Saint-Exupéry wrote and illustrated the book in exile in New York during the hard years of the Second World War; it first appeared in the United States in 1943, three years before it could be printed in occupied France. The opening scene—a lone pilot in the desert with a broken plane—is a direct reflection of the author's own 1935 crash in the Libyan desert; even the book's famous line about a hidden well in the desert springs from those four days without water.
Content and Structure
After traveling among the planets, the Little Prince reaches Earth and, in a garden full of roses, discovers with sorrow that his own flower—which on his planet he believed unique in the world—is in fact one of thousands alike. There he meets a fox who teaches him what it means to “tame”: a bond that makes someone or something unique through the time one has given them. The fox tells him that what is essential remains invisible to the eye and can be seen only with the heart; and there the Little Prince understands why his flower, with all her faults and stubbornness, is dearer to him than thousands of others—because the time he spent on her made her unique. The book ends with the Little Prince's sad and ambiguous return to his planet, aided by the bite of a snake—an ending that never clearly explains whether that return is death or salvation.
Reception and Influence
With sales approaching two hundred million copies and translation into more than three hundred languages and dialects, The Little Prince is, after the Bible, the most translated literary work in human history. The book is taught both on children's literature shelves and in philosophy and psychology syllabi; generations of readers first encounter it in childhood as a simple tale and years later, as adults, read it again and discover an entirely different layer.
One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.
Why Read This Book Today?
With rare delicacy and without direct sermon, The Little Prince reminds grown-ups what they have lost on the way to “becoming serious”: the ability to see an elephant inside a boa constrictor, unconditional curiosity, and the belief that the time we give to someone or something is not waste but an investment that makes them unique in the world. Eighty years after publication, in a world where speed and efficiency so often outrank relationship and patience, that message may seem even more necessary than in its own time.