Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince

Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) was published in New York on April 6, 1943 by Reynal and Hitchcock, in French and in an English translation by Katherine Woods. A pilot stranded in the Sahara desert after an engine failure meets a small boy with golden hair who says he has come from a tiny asteroid, where he left a vain rose. The prince recounts his visits to other planets, with a king, a conceited man, a drinker, a businessman, a lamplighter and a geographer, before he reaches Earth and befriends a fox, who teaches him what it means to tame someone.¹

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, born in 1900, was a French aviator who flew airmail routes over Africa and South America. In December 1935 he crashed in the Libyan desert with his mechanic Andre Prevot, and the two nearly died of thirst before a Bedouin rescued them. After the fall of France in 1940 he lived in exile in the United States, where he wrote the book in 1942, with his own watercolor illustrations. The tale is a children's story about adults, about the loss of imagination and the importance of love and responsibility. Its best-known line says that what is essential is invisible to the eye.¹

Because of the war the book appeared in France only in 1946. Saint-Exupery had rejoined a French reconnaissance unit flying with the Allies, and he disappeared on a mission over the Mediterranean on July 31, 1944, before the book's fame had grown. Wreckage of his plane was located off Marseille around 2000. The Little Prince has been translated into more than 500 languages and dialects, and sold an estimated 140 to 200 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books of all time.¹²