The Little Prince was written in New York in 1942, during Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s wartime exile from occupied France, and published simultaneously in English and French by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943. Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Mediterranean on a reconnaissance mission in July 1944 and was never found. The book he wrote in those last New York months has since become the most translated French-language book in history and one of the best-selling books ever published — with estimates ranging above 200 million copies across more than 300 languages and dialects. It has never, in eighty years, gone out of print.
Saint-Exupéry was a pioneering aviator as well as a writer — he had flown mail routes across the Sahara and the Andes and had written about those experiences in Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight. The desert landscape of The Little Prince is autobiographical: the narrator, a pilot stranded after an emergency landing in the Sahara, is Saint-Exupéry himself, thinly displaced into fiction. The book was written partly as a work of longing — for a France he could not reach, for a way of life that was being destroyed, for the childhood sensibility that adult practicality and the violence of the war had systematically buried.
The book presents itself as a children’s story and is illustrated with Saint
