Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon in 1900 to an old aristocratic family with little money. His father died when he was three. He failed the entrance exam for the naval academy, did his military service in the air force in 1921 and learned to fly.

In the late 1920s he flew mail routes for the airline Aéropostale across the Sahara and South America and ran a remote airfield at Cape Juby in the Western Sahara. His books drew on that work, among them Night Flight (1931) and Wind, Sand and Stars (1939). In 1935 he crashed in the Libyan desert and nearly died of thirst before a Bedouin found him.

He wrote The Little Prince (1943) in exile in New York and painted its watercolor pictures himself. A pilot stranded in the desert meets a boy from a tiny planet who tells him about his rose and the adults he met on other worlds. The book argues that what matters most is invisible to the eye. He rejoined the Free French air force and disappeared on a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean in July 1944.