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'''Antoine de Saint-Exupéry''' a French aviator and writer (1900-1944), remembered for his lyrical reflections on flight, solitude and human responsibility, and above all for the novella The Little Prince, one of the most widely read and translated books in the world. His life was divided between the early airlines of the 1920s and the dangers of wartime reconnaissance.

== Early Life and Aviation ==
Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon in June 1900 into an old aristocratic family that had lost much of its fortune. He was educated in France and in Switzerland, and he failed the entrance examination for the naval academy. After a period in the army and in various jobs, he learned to fly and took his first post as a pilot, launching a career that would define his life and his writing.

In 1926 he joined the pioneering airline that would become Aéropostale, carrying mail between Toulouse and West Africa and then, from 1927, along the difficult South American route across the Andes. He flew the desert stretches of the Sahara and, later, the mountains between Argentina and Chile. These experiences among the early aviators gave his work its material and its heroism.

In 1935, while attempting a long-distance flight, he crashed in the Libyan desert and nearly died of thirst before being rescued. The ordeal, in which he and his mechanic wandered for days without water, became one of the formative experiences of his life and is recounted in Wind, Sand and Stars. He also suffered major accidents in the treacherous Andes and in Guatemala.

== Literary Works and Themes ==
His first novel, Southern Mail (1929), and its successor Night Flight (1931), which won the Prix Femina, drew directly on his experience of the mail routes. Night Flight portrays the discipline and the sacrifice demanded by the early airline, and the tension between the duty of the pilot and the claims of personal love. They established him as a writer of the aviation age.

Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) established his international reputation. It is a meditation rather than a novel, moving between the concrete dangers of flying and reflections on solitude and on what men owe one another. The book won the Grand Prix of the Académie Française and brought him a readership in the United States and beyond.

The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince, 1943) is his best-known work, written in America during the war and illustrated with his own watercolours. It tells of a pilot who meets in the desert a small prince from another planet, and through their conversations on love, loss and the essential things that are invisible to the eye, it offers a fable of extraordinary simplicity and depth. It has been translated into hundreds of languages.

== War, Exile and Disappearance ==
At the outbreak of war in 1939 Saint-Exupéry served in a reconnaissance squadron, and after the fall of France in 1940 he went into exile in the United States and then in North Africa. In New York he wrote The Little Prince and the long autobiographical meditation The Wisdom of the Sands, and he worked to bring the United States into the war.

He rejoined the French air force in North Africa despite being over the age limit for pilots and in poor health. His superiors permitted him to fly a small number of reconnaissance missions, and he was deeply affected by the sense that his generation was being asked to make the sacrifices of the young. His writings of this period are marked by a growing religious and moral seriousness.

On 31 July 1944 he took off from a base in Sardinia on a photographic reconnaissance mission over occupied France and never returned. The fate of his aircraft remained a mystery for decades until the wreckage was recovered from the sea near Marseille in 1998, and the circumstances of the crash are still not fully known. He had died, in the war he had insisted on serving, at the age of forty-four.

== Ideas and Literary Style ==
The values that animate Saint-Exupéry's writing are responsibility, solidarity and the dignity of action. He held that man is defined not by what he is but by what he undertakes, and that the meaning of life is found in fellowship and in the acceptance of duty. Flying, for him, was less a technical adventure than a school of the spirit, in which a man is brought face to face with what is essential.

His style combines the report with the meditation. He wrote plainly and with a lyricism that avoids ornament, moving without transition from the details of flying to reflections on friendship, death and the human condition. The apparent simplicity of The Little Prince conceals a carefully constructed allegory, and its images of the rose, the fox and the baobabs have been interpreted in many ways.

His thought has been called a moral philosophy of action, and its roots lie in a Catholic and aristocratic tradition enriched by the modern experience of danger and technology. He was not a systematic thinker but a witness, and it is the personal note, of a man reporting what he has seen and felt, that gives his books their enduring power.

== Influence and Legacy ==
The Little Prince is among the best-selling and most translated books ever written, and it has been adapted into plays, films, operas and a musical. Its phrases about what is essential being invisible to the eye have become part of the common language, and it is read by children and by adults in a great many countries. Saint-Exupéry's watercolours are as familiar as his text.

His aviation writings helped to create the literature of flight and influenced a generation of pilots and writers. He is honoured in France as a national figure, and his portrait appeared on the French banknote and on postage stamps. Airports and streets are named after him, and the airport of Lyon bears his name.

He is remembered as a writer whose life and work formed a single argument for courage, responsibility and the value of the human bond. His disappearance during the war gave his last pages a poignancy that time has only deepened. Few authors have combined the record of a dangerous profession with a popular philosophy of the heart so completely.

== See also ==
* The Little Prince
* Aéropostale
* French literature
* Aviation writing

== References ==

<ref name="r1">Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, translated by Katherine Woods, Harcourt, 1943.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, translated by Lewis Galantière, Harcourt, 1939.</ref>
<ref name="r3">Stacy Schiff, Saint-Exupéry: A Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Curtis Cate, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: His Life and Times, Heinemann, 1970.</ref>

<references />

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Novels]]
[[Category:France]]

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - Revision history

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