Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | French Aviator, Author & Poet | Britannica (2025)

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (born June 29, 1900, Lyon, France—died July 31, 1944, near Marseille) was a French aviator and writer whose works are the unique testimony of a pilot and a warrior who looked at adventure and danger with a poet’s eyes. His fable Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) has become a modern classic.

Saint-Exupéry came from an impoverished aristocratic family. A poor student, he failed the entrance examination to the École Navale and then studied architecture for several months at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1921 he was conscripted into the French air force, and he qualified as a military pilot a year later. In 1926 he joined the Compagnie Latécoère in Toulouse and helped establish airmail routes over northwest Africa, the South Atlantic, and South America. In the 1930s he worked as a test pilot, a publicity attaché for Air France, and a reporter for Paris-Soir. In 1939, despite permanent disabilities resulting from serious flying accidents, he became a military reconnaissance pilot. After the fall of France (1940), he left for the United States; he remained there until 1943, when he resumed flying with his former squadron in the Mediterranean theatre. In 1944 he took off from an airfield in Corsica to conduct a reconnaissance mission over France and never returned. Sixty years later, wreckage raised from the seabed near Marseille was identified as belonging to his plane. It had probably been shot down by an enemy fighter, though the cause of the crash may never be known.

Saint-Exupéry found in aviation both a source for heroic action and a new literary theme. His works exalt perilous adventures at the cost of life as the highest realization of man’s vocation. In his first book, Courrier sud (1929; Southern Mail), his new man of the skies, airmail pilot Jacques Bernis, dies in the desert of Rio de Oro. His second novel, Vol de nuit (1931; Night Flight), was dedicated to the glory of the first airline pilots and their mystical exaltation as they faced death in the rigorous performance of their duty. His own flying adventures are recorded in Terre des hommes (1939; Wind, Sand and Stars). He used his plane as an instrument to explore the world and to discover human solidarity in the fraternal efforts of men to accomplish their tasks. His language is lyrical and moving, with a simple nobility. Pilote de guerre (1942; Flight to Arras) is a personal reminiscence of a reconnaissance sortie in May 1940 accomplished in a spirit of sacrifice against desperate odds. While in America he wrote Lettre à un otage (1943; Letter to a Hostage), a call to unity among Frenchmen, and Le Petit Prince (1943; The Little Prince), a child’s fable for adults, with a gentle and grave reminder that the best things in life are still the simplest ones and that real wealth is giving to others.

The growing sadness and pessimism in Saint-Exupéry’s view of man appears in Citadelle (1948; The Wisdom of the Sands), a posthumous volume of reflections that show Saint-Exupéry’s persistent belief that man’s only lasting reason for living is as repository of the values of civilization.