Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In 1931, he married a widow, Consuelo Gomez Carillo, a Salvadoran-French writer and artist. Their marriage was a stormy one and they broke up eventually due to his involvement with other women after marriage.

In 1993, until the introduction of Euro in market, French government issued a commemorative bank note of 50-franc comprising of his portrait and several of his drawings from ‘The Little Prince’. They also issued a 100-franc commemorative coin in his honor.

In 1999, Quebec government put a plaque at family home of Charles de Konick, head of the Philosohy department at Universite Laval, to commemorate the stay of Saint-Exupery during May-June 1942 when he lectured in Canada.

He was born into an poor aristocratic family of Count Jean de Saint-Exupery and his wife, Countess Marie de Fonscolombe. He was the third of their five children. His father’s untimely death, plunged the whole family into financial hardship.

He spent his childhood at the castle of Saint-Maurice-de-Remens and had his early education at Jesuit Schools in Montgre and Le Mans.

In 1915, he went a Catholic boarding School in Switzerland which he had to leave in 1917 due to his bad performance in final examination.

He joined a naval preparatory academy, which he had to leave due to his successive failure in the final examinations. He got admitted at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to pursue a course in architecture but later gave it up as a result of failure in examinations.

In 1921, he began his military training and was conscripted into the French air force near Strasbourg a little later. He left the service after two years due to few personal issues and took up odd jobs for the next few years.

In 1926, he returned to his earlier profession of a pilot and joined a private airline Aeropostale, which flew mail from Toulouse, France to Dakar, Senegal. In the following year, he got appointed as an air field chief for Cape Juby in Southern Morocco, in Sahara Desert.

In 1929, he got transferred to Argentina where he was appointed as a director of Aeroposta Argentina Company, which was the subsidiary of French airmail carrier ‘Aeropostale’.

In 1935, he survived a plane crash in the Sahara Desert along with the mechanic navigator Andre Privot while flying from Paris to Saigon. They wandered in the desert for 3-4 days and were about to die of dehydration before they were miraculously saved by the native tribes. He mentioned about his 1935 plane crash near-death experience in his 1939 memoir ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’.

During Second World War he was initially with the French Air force but after France’s 1940 armistice with Germany, he escaped to New York

In 1929, he published his first book, ‘Courrier Sud’ (Southern Mail), which was later adapted into a French film.

In 1931, he came out with his second book, ‘Vol de Nuit’ (Night Flight), which became an international bestseller the moment it arrived in the market. It was one of his critically acclaimed novels which reflected his service as a mail pilot.

In 1942, he published his memoir, ‘Pilote de guerre’ (Flight to Arras) which recounts his role in the French Air Force during the Battle of France in 1940. In the same year, he published ‘Lettre a un otage’ (Letter to a Hostage) which were all about the French living under Nazi oppression. Later this year, he wrote ‘The Little Prince’, which was published in early 1943 and is regarded as one of his best classics.