Antoine de Saint-Exupery was born into an old French family in
1900. Despite his father's death in 1904 he had an idyllic
childhood, shared with his brother and three sisters at the
family's ch teau near Lyon. He was educated at a strict Jesuit
school in Le Mans and then at the college of Saint-Jean in
Fribourg. Against the wishes of his family he qualified as a pilot
during his national service, and flew in France and North Africa
until his demobilization in 1923. Unsuited to civilian life and
deeply hurt by a failed relationship with the writer Louise de
Vilmorin, he returned to his first love, flying. In 1926 he joined
the airline Lateco re, later to become Aeropostale, as one of its
pioneering aviators, charged with opening mail routes to remote
African colonies and to South America with primitive planes and in
dangerous conditions.
As airfield manager at the tiny outpost of Cape Juby in Morocco his
duties included rescuing stranded pilots from rebel tribesmen, and
it was there that he wrote Southern Mail, which was well received
on its publication in 1929. From a later posting to Buenos Aires he
brought the manuscript of Night Flight back to France, together
with his fiancee, the beautiful but temperamental Consuelo Suncin.
Night Flight was awarded the Prix Femina in 1931, firmly
establishing his literary reputation. Flying and writing were
inseparable elements in his passionate creativity, but he was not a
model pilot; he was nonchalant about checks, and tended to lapse
into reveries at the controls.
His career was chequered with near-fatal crashes and in 1936 he
came down in Libya while attempting to break the Paris-Saigon
record. The story of his miraculous survival in the desert is told
in Wind, Sand and Stars. At the outbreak of the Second World War he
was too old to fly a fighter but flew in a reconnaissance squadron
until the French surrender in the summer of 1940. In exile in
America he published the essay Letter to a Hostage and The Little
Prince, the enigmatic children's fable for which he is known
worldwide. Prior to this he had written of his war experiences in
Flight to Arras, which headed the US bestseller list for six months
in 1942 and was banned by the Vichy government in France. However,
he refused to support de Gaulle and was vilified by the General's
Free French supporters. Depressed by this and by his troubled
marriage, he pestered Allied commanders in the Mediterranean to let
him fly again, and it was in July 1944 that he disappeared, almost
certainly shot down over the sea by a German fighter.
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