• Born: 29 June 1900
• Birthplace: Lyon, France
• Died: 31 July 1944 (airplane crash)
• Best Known As: Author of The Little Prince

Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupéry was a French aviator and the author of the children's fable The Little Prince (1943). A veteran of France's air service (1921-23), he spent most of his working life in commercial aviation. He flew postal routes across Spain into Africa -- he survived a 1935 crash in the Sahara -- and flew in Brazil and Argentina for a time. He also wrote novels. Southern Mail (1929), Night Flight (1931) and Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) brought him critical and popular success. He flew for the French at the beginning of World War II, but with Germany's occupation of France Saint-Exupéry relocated to the U.S. and Canada, where he wrote his most famous work, The Little Prince. Despite being a little too old to fly, he joined the Free French and Allied air forces toward the end of World War II. He went on a mission to collect information on German troop movements in the Rhone valley on 31 July 1944 and was never seen again; Saint-Exupéry became France's own Amelia Earhart. His aircraft was discovered in the late 1990s off the coast of Marseilles, but his corpse was missing. Former German ace pilot Horst Rippert claimed in 2008 that he was nearly certain he'd shot down Saint Exupéry in 1944 (Rippert also expressed regret, calling Saint Exupéry one of his favorite authors at the time).

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The French novelist and essayist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), a pioneer commercial pilot, more than any other writer can be regarded as the poet of flight.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons on June 29, 1900; he attended Jesuit schools in France and Switzerland. He was a poor and unruly student but took great interest in the rapidly developing science of flight. In 1921 he began military service and learned to fly, later being commissioned as an air force officer. After 3 years in business, Saint-Exupéry became a commercial pilot in 1926, flying first from France to Morocco and West Africa. From his experiences he drew the novel that launched his literary career in 1929, Courrier Sud (Southern Mail). Here he portrays the pilot's solitary struggle against the elements and his sense of dedication to his vocation, stronger even than love.

In 1929 Saint-Exupéry was transferred to Buenos Aires, and he married in 1931. The same year he published his second book, Vol de nuit (Night Flight). Again the theme is the pilot's devotion to duty, and although, as in Courrier Sud, it ends in his death, this is seen not as defeat but as victory, a step forward in man's conquest of his environment. For Saint-Exupéry there are higher values than human life, and the novel achieves an almost tragic intensity.

During the following years Saint-Exupéry pursued his flying career, despite several crashes, but published no more books until 1939, when he brought out Terre des hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars). Less a novel than a series of essays containing the pilot's meditations, poetic in tone, on the spiritual aspects of the adventure of flight, it brought Saint-Exupéry to the height of literary fame.

In 1939 Saint-Exupéry rejoined the French air force and was decorated for bravery in 1940. After the French defeat, he went to the United States, where he wrote Pilote de guerre (Flight to Arras), published in 1942. This is the record of a reconnaissance mission in May 1940, during the German invasion of France, and the author's almost miraculous survival against enormous odds. In 1943 he rejoined his unit in North Africa, fighting with the Free French; although now overage, he insisted on undertaking reconnaissance missions. On July 31, 1944, his aircraft disappeared near Corsica, probably shot down by a German fighter; no trace was ever discovered.

Other works of Saint-Exupéry include a children's story, Le Petit prince (1943; The Little Prince); a long philosophical work published posthumously, Citadelle (1948; The Wisdom of the Sands); and volumes of correspondence and notebook jottings.

Further Reading

Curtis Cate, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: His Life and Times (1970), is an excellent biography. Other studies, biographical as much as literary, include Richard Rumbold and Lady Margaret Stewart, The Winged Life (1955); Maxwell A. Smith, Knight of the Air: The Life and Works of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1956); and Marcel Migeo, Saint-Exupéry (trans. 1961). A good short study of him is in Henri Peyre, French Novelists of Today (1967).

Additional Sources

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, Wind, sand and star, London, Heine-mann, 1970.

Nicolson, Harold George, Sir, Sainte-Beuve, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.

For more information on Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupéry, visit Britannica.com.

Saint‐Exupéry, Antoine Jean‐Baptiste Marie Roger de (1900–44), French aviator and author of autobiographical novels and metaphysical fantasy. ‘St‐Ex’ was an impoverished aristocrat who had a mystical communion with aviation, the source of his creativity. His sparse, spiritual works all record the transcendence of perspective he experienced while flying over North Africa or being stranded in the desert—events that crystallized for him man's responsibility towards others.

He worked as a mail pilot, negotiated airline routes on two continents, ran rescue missions in the desert, and reported on the Spanish Civil War. While convalescing from various crashes, he wrote aviation novels such as Courrier sud (Southern Mail, 1929) and the prize‐winning Vol de nuit (Night Flight, 1931). Terre des hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939), winner of the French Academy's prize for Best Novel and the (American) National Book Award, was based on his mystical near‐death epiphany in the Sahara; a reconnaissance sortie that earned him the Croix de Guerre inspired Pilote de Guerre (Flight to Arras, 1942), which Vichy banned as a ‘Gaullist manifesto’. Exiled for two years, he lived in New York before returning to North Africa to train pilots. He perished during his 10th reconnaissance flight and was posthumously awarded a second Croix de Guerre.

Saint‐Exupéry is best remembered as the author‐illustrator of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince, 1943), the number one best‐selling children's book. Dedicated to a friend who was at the time a World War II hostage, it is a fairy tale addressed to children and to the children that grown‐ups had once been. A boy‐prince has fled a vain rose on asteroid B‐612. In his interplanetary travels, he encounters other allegorical characters, meets a marooned pilot in the Sahara, and asks him to draw a sheep. Because the only acceptable sketch is of a closed box with the (invisible) animal inside, the adult learns from the child that that which is truly meaningful can only be perceived by the spirit—a theme that resonates throughout Saint‐Exupéry's work. Likewise, the boy learns about social responsibility and returns home to tame his rose.

This slim volume has elicited scores of divergent analyses. Because the Little Prince sacrifices himself and his (transfigured) body is not found, theologians note analogies to Christ, the Prince of Peace. Philosophers cite parallels to Plato's ‘Allegory of the Cave’, Aristotle's Ethics, and Heidegger's phenomenology. Social critics refer to the imaginary voyages of ‘Candide’, Gulliver's Travels, and Alice in Wonderland, while psychoanalysts posit models of solitude, memory, and maturation. Finally, those arguing against over‐interpretation urge us to accept this lyrical fable with childlike wonder, lest its magic be destroyed.

Bibliography

• Capestany, Edward J., The Dialectic of The Little Prince (1982).
• Higgins, James E., The Little Prince, A Reverie of Substance (1996).
• Monin, Yves, L'Esotérisme du Petit Prince (1975).
• Robinson, Joy D. Marie, Antoine de Saint Exupéry (1984).
• Schiff, Stacy, Saint‐Exupéry: A Biography (1994).

— Mary Louise Ennis

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de (1900-44). One of the most important French metaphysical novelists of the inter-war years. An early aviation pioneer, a colleague of Jean Mermoz in the legendary Aéropostale, he uses his novels to raise flying and the figure of the pilot to a symbolic status by which they represent heroic transcendence of the human condition, in the same way that Malraux is able to exploit adventure.

His first two novels, Courrier-Sud (1928) and Vol de nuit (1931), recount the heroic pioneering days of the establishment of the airmail link between Europe and South America. Terre des hommes (1939) uses a number of flying anecdotes, particularly one concerning a crash in the desert, to constitute a general reflection on the aviator as standard-bearer of humanism. Pilote de guerre (1942) is based upon his experience as a fighter pilot in the Battle of France. His posthumously published fictionalized essay Citadelle (1948) is an ambitious attempt to outline an entire social philosophy in which Christianity and humanism combine. In spite of a disturbing tendency, at its most marked in Vol de nuit and Citadelle, to emphasize the role of the leader and to concentrate upon the pilot as a figure apart from the rest of humanity, Saint-Exupéry was clearly aware of the ethical problems involved in a celebration of the hero, as is indicated in both Terre des hommes and the charming and deceptively simple children's story Le Petit Prince (1943).

[Nicholas Hewitt]

(Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupéry) (äNtwän'-märē'-rôzhā' də săNtĕgzüpārē'), 1900–1944, French aviator and writer. He became a commercial pilot and published his first story in 1926. Mainly involved in the nascent air-mail industry, he flew in Europe, Africa, and South America. During World War II he was a military pilot and was lost in action. His writings reflect his feeling for the open skies and desert and embody his love of freedom of action. Courrier Sud (1929, tr. Southern Mail, 1933), Vol de nuit (1931, tr. Night Flight, 1932), and Terre des hommes (1939, tr. Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939) are impressionistic, poetic narratives expressing a highly personal philosophy that stresses individual responsibility and the life of the mind. Pilote de guerre (1942, tr. Flight to Arras, 1942) tells of a hopeless French reconnaissance flight in 1940. His last book, the fable Le Petit Prince (1943, tr. The Little Prince, 1943), has become a classic, read by adults and children.

Bibliography

See biographies by C. Cate (1970), J. M. Robinson (1984), and S. Schiff (1995).

Quotes:

"Commonly, people believe that defeat is characterized by a general bustle and a feverish rush. Bustle and rush are the signs of victory, not of defeat. Victory is a thing of action. It is a house in the act of being built. Every participant in victory sweats and puffs, carrying the stones for the building of the house. But defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility."

"The injustice of defeat lies in the fact that its most innocent victims are made to look like heartless accomplices. It is impossible to see behind defeat, the sacrifices, the austere performance of duty, the self-discipline and the vigilance that are there -- those things the god of battle does not take account of."

"When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter. The body is an old crock that nobody will miss. I have never known a man to think of himself when dying. Never."

"The one thing that matters is the effort."

"There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begin to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What are we worth when motionless, is the question."

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

See more famous quotes by Antoine De Saint-Exupery