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 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was fascinated by flight from a young age. Born in 1900, he attended Jesuit schools in France and Switzerland. Although a poor student, he developed an interest in the science of flight. In 1921, he joined the military service and was ultimately sent for training as a pilot. He gained his commercial pilot’s license in 1926 and began flying a mail route for the Compagnie Latécoère from France to Morocco, which inspired his first novel, Courrier Sud (Southern Mail), a largely autobiographical work. After the book’s publication in1929, Saint-Exupéry moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he met and married Consuelo Gómez Carillo, a French-Salvadoran writer and artist. His second novel, Vol de nuit (Night Flight), loosely based on his life as an airmail pilot in South America, was published in 1931. The book was met with great success; it won the Prix Femina and was adapted into a 1933 movie starring Clark Gable and Lionel Barrymore. Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand, and Stars), a memoir of his most dangerous experiences flying mail routes across the Sahara Desert and Andes Mountains published in 1939, put him at the height of his fame. It won the National Book Award in the United States and the Grand Prix du Roman. At the onset of World War II, he rejoined the French Air Force and was decorated for bravery. After Germany’s defeat of France in 1940, Saint-Exupéry moved to America and wrote Flight to Arras, a novel which documented his flights over enemy lines. A year later, he published his most famous work, The Little Prince. Although he was over age and in poor health, he began flying again for the Free French Forces in 1943. On July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupéry took off from an airbase on Corsica for a solo photographic mission collecting intelligence on German troop movements in southern France—and disappeared. He was never seen again.
In 1998, a French fisherman found an ID bracelet with Saint-Exupéry’s name on it. In May 2000 a Lockheed Lighting P-38 was discovered in the sea off the coast of Marseille; in 2004, the remains were confirmed to have been his plane. In March 2008, an 85-year-old former German pilot claimed that he had shot down Saint-Exupéry’s plane in 1944—but his story is unverifiable. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s death remains a mystery.
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