The Little Prince

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger de Saint-Exupéry, born on June 29, 1900, in Lyon and died in flight on July 31, 1944, at sea, in the coast of Marseille, death for France, is a writer, poet, aviator and French reporter. Born in a family of French nobility, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry spent a happy childhood despite the premature death of his father. Little bright student, however he got his Bachelor’s degree in 1917 and, after his failure at the naval school, he turned to art and architecture. He became pilot during his military service in 1921 in Strasbourg, he was hired in 1926 by company Latécoère (future Aéropostale) and carried mail from Toulouse to Senegal before rejoining South America in 1929. At the same time, he published, inspired by his experiences as aviator, his first novels: Southern Mail, in 1929, and especially Night Flight, in 1931, which was a great success. As of 1932, his employer entered a difficult period. Then, Saint-Exupéry dedicated to writing and journalism. He undertook big reports to Vietnam in 1934, to Moscow in 1935, to Spain in 1936, which feed his reflection on the humanistic values that he develops in Wind, Sand and Stars, published in 1939. In 1939, he served the Air Force where he is assigned to a reconnaissance squadron. At the armistice, he left France to New York aiming to bring Americans o the war and he became one of the voices of Resistance. Dreaming for action, he finally joined, in the spring of 1944, in Sardinia, then in Corsica, a unit responsible for photographic reconnaissance for landing in Provence. He was lost at sea with his plane, a P-38 Lightning F5B during his mission on July 31, 1944. His plane was found only in 2000 in the coast of Marseille. The Little Prince, written in New York during the war, was published with his own watercolor paintings in 1943, in New York, and in 1946, in Gallimard, France. This tale, full of charm and humanity, quickly became a huge worldwide