Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French aviator and author whose fable The Little Prince has become one of the most translated and widely loved books in the history of literature.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a pioneering aviator as well as a writer — he flew mail routes over North Africa and South America — and his books about flight are infused with the particular knowledge of a man for whom the sky was a working environment rather than a metaphor. The Little Prince, published in 1943 shortly before his disappearance on a reconnaissance mission, was his last work.

The Little Prince is a short book — a fable, really — in which a pilot forced down in the Sahara meets a small prince from another planet who tells him about his travels and his home. It operates on multiple levels simultaneously: it is a children’s book in its illustrations and its simplicity, but its themes — love, loss, imagination, the corruption of adult seriousness, the cost of forgetting what matters — are addressed to adults. The fox’s teaching about taming and the rose’s contradictions are among the most quoted passages in French literature for good reason.

The book has been sentimentalized in its popular reception to a degree that sometimes obscures how melancholy and clear-eyed it actually is. Saint-Exupéry is not simply saying that adults should be more childlike; he is saying something more precise and harder about what is lost in the process of becoming a person who counts things and manages things and forgets to look at sunsets. Written in exile in New York as France fell to the Germans, The Little Prince is a book about grief and beauty written by someone who did not survive the war in which he wrote it.