Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's timeless tale, reissued in a beautiful clothbound edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power.
The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.
Writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), was born into an aristocratic French family at the turn of the century. Saint-Exupéry was preoccupied with aviation from a young age; a passion which would lead him into the French Air Force. His first two books, Southern Mail and Night Flight, are distinguished by a poetic evocation of the romance and discipline of flying. Later works, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Flight to Arras, stress his humanistic philosophy. Saint-Exupéry's popular children's book The Little Prince is also read by adults for its allegorical meaning. In 1944, Saint-Exupéry's plane disappeared during a mission in World War II.