Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, Count de Saint-Exupéry was a French writer, poet, and professional aviator.

He was born in the French city of Lyon, into the family of a provincial nobleman (a count). At the age of four, he lost his father. Antoine was raised by his mother. Saint-Exupéry graduated from a Jesuit school in Le Mans, studied at a Catholic boarding school in Switzerland, and in 1917 entered the School of Fine Arts in Paris, in the department of architecture.

A turning point in his life came in 1921, when he was drafted into the army and sent to pilot training courses. A year later Saint-Exupéry received his pilot’s license and moved to Paris, where he turned to writing. At first, however, he did not win acclaim in this field and was forced to take any work he could find: he sold cars and worked as a bookseller.

Only in 1925 did Saint-Exupéry find his vocation: he became a pilot for the company Aéropostale, which delivered mail to the northern coast of Africa. Two years later he was appointed head of the airport at Cap Juby (the town of Villa Bens), at the very edge of the Sahara, and it was there that he finally found the inner peace that fills his later books.

In 1929, Saint-Exupéry headed his airline’s branch in Buenos Aires; in 1931 he returned to Europe, again flew mail routes, and also worked as a test pilot. From the mid-1930s he also appeared as a journalist; in particular, in 1935 he visited Moscow as a correspondent and described this trip in five interesting essays. He also went to the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent. At the beginning of World War II, Saint-Exupéry made several combat sorties and was put forward for the War Cross (French: Croix de Guerre). In June 1941 he moved to his sister’s home in the zone not occupied by the fascists, and later moved to the United States. He lived in New York, where, among other things, he wrote his most famous book, The Little Prince (1942, published 1943). In 1943 he returned to the French Air Force and