Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
1900–1944 1 entry
Biography
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French writer and aviator, the author of The Little Prince. Born in Lyon in 1900 into an old aristocratic family, he learned to fly during his military service, and in the 1920s he became a pilot for the airmail company Aéropostale, carrying the post over the Sahara and later over the Andes in South America. Out of these flights came his novels Night Flight, which won the Prix Femina in 1931, and Wind, Sand and Stars.
In 1935, trying to break a speed record between Paris and Saigon, he crashed in the Libyan desert and wandered for days without water before a Bedouin found him. During the Second World War, in exile in New York, he wrote The Little Prince and illustrated it with his own watercolours; published in 1943, it has become one of the most translated books in the world. He then flew again for the Free French air force, and on 31 July 1944 he took off from Corsica on a reconnaissance flight from which he never came back. Parts of his plane were found decades later in the sea near Marseille.
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