Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born on June 29, 1900, in Lyon, France, into an aristocratic family. His father died when he was young, and his mother raised him and his siblings. Saint-Exupéry studied at schools in Switzerland and France before briefly attending the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Although he did not complete a university degree, aviation soon became the defining force of his life.

In 1921, Saint-Exupéry began military service and trained as a pilot. After leaving the army, he joined the pioneering French airmail company Aéropostale. He flew dangerous routes between France, North Africa, and South America, helping establish regular air links across difficult terrain and weather. In 1927, he became director of the Cape Juby airfield in Spanish Morocco, where he sometimes negotiated the release of pilots captured by local tribes. His experiences as a commercial aviator inspired his first novel, *Southern Mail*, published in 1929.

Saint-Exupéry later flew routes connecting Argentina and France and served as a director of Aeroposta Argentina. His second major work, *Night Flight*, appeared in 1931. The novel portrays pilots confronting darkness, storms, isolation, and strict duty. It received the Prix Femina and made him internationally famous. In 1939, he published *Wind, Sand and Stars*, a memoir that combined accounts of aviation with reflections on friendship, responsibility, and human courage. The book won the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie Française and the National Book Award in the United States.

After the fall of France in 1940, Saint-Exupéry lived in exile in the United States. There he wrote *Flight to Arras*, based on his service as a reconnaissance pilot during the Battle of France. In 1943, he published *The Little Prince*, illustrated with his own watercolors. Its narrator, a pilot stranded in the Sahara, meets a child from a tiny asteroid who visits several planets and encounters figures representing vanity, greed, bureaucracy, and loneliness. The book became his best-known work.

Saint-Exupéry returned to military service with the Free French forces in North Africa. On July 31, 1944, he departed from Borgo, Corsica, for a reconnaissance mission over occupied France and failed to return. For decades his disappearance remained unexplained. In 1998, a fisherman found his identity bracelet near Marseille, and in 2000 divers located wreckage from his Lockheed P-38 Lightning off the coast. The aircraft was recovered in 2003, confirming the site of his final flight.