Encyclopedia · Map of thought

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Author · 1900–1944 · France

Biography

Before he was a writer, Saint-Exupéry was a pilot—one of the pioneering aviators of the French airline Aéropostale who, in the 1920s, flew dangerous and little-known mail routes over the Sahara and the Andes. Years before writing The Little Prince, in 1935, while attempting a speed record from Paris to Saigon, his plane crashed in the Libyan desert. He and his mechanic, André Prévot, wandered for four days with almost no water or food in deadly heat, suffered hallucinations from dehydration, and were finally rescued by a caravan of Bedouins—an experience that years later drew the opening scene of The Little Prince directly from that real desert. After France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, Saint-Exupéry went into exile in New York. It was there that he wrote and illustrated The Little Prince; the book first appeared in the United States in 1943, in both French and English—occupied France would not allow its publication. Less than a year and a half later he joined the Free French Air Force and returned to flying. On 31 July 1944, after dining with friends and, according to witnesses, cheerfully showing card tricks, he flew a reconnaissance mission over southern France and never returned. No trace of him was found until 1998, when a fisherman pulled his bracelet from the sea; in 2000 the wreckage of his plane was found on the floor of the Mediterranean near Marseille. The exact cause of the crash is still not definitively known.

More about their life

Before The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry had written several books drawn from his direct experience as a pilot: Southern Mail, Night Flight, and especially Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes), reflective memoirs of danger, camaraderie, and the meaning of work at altitude that also recount the 1935 crash in the Libyan desert. That aviation background explains why The Little Prince opens with a lone pilot whose plane has broken down in the desert; the narrator is, in effect, the author himself, in the same desert where years earlier he had nearly died. Saint-Exupéry grew up in an aristocratic family in Lyon and in adolescence lost his younger brother to rheumatic fever—a loss some biographers see reflected in the lasting sense of absence and longing that runs through The Little Prince. He dedicated the book to his friend Léon Werth, a Jew living in hiding in occupied France; yet in the sentence that opens the dedication he apologizes to children for dedicating the book to a “grown-up”—and immediately adds that this grown-up loves all the grown-ups in the world, even when he was a child.

Contribution: With The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry proved that a children's story can at the same time be a philosophical meditation for adults on the loss of wonder, responsibility in love, and the difference between seeing with the eyes and seeing with the heart. After the Bible, it is the most translated literary work in history, and it blurred a boundary between children's literature and philosophical literature that few before him had taken seriously.

Style & themes: His prose is simple, precise, and often pictorial—the precision expected of a pilot who must deliver a vital report in a few words. Recurring themes include the contrast between childlike and adult ways of seeing the world, responsibility toward those we have “tamed,” loneliness and longing for connection, and the belief that what truly matters often remains invisible to the eye.

One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Saint-Exupéry's enduring importance lies in the fact that his life and death, like his story itself, never became fully explainable: a pilot who nearly died in the desert wrote a book about that desert and finally vanished in the sky without a settled account. That bond between the author's real life and the fable he wrote turned The Little Prince from a simple children's tale into one of the twentieth century's deepest books.

In the LogosCamp ecosystem

Inspired?

Publish your essays and reviews and become part of the knowledge graph.

Join LogosCamp as a Writer Join as reader or critic

Improve this page

Suggest an edit Contribute