Antoine saint exupery biography

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons, France on June 29, As a child, he was educated in both France and Switzerland. His passions were aviation and writing. He achieved the stature of a national hero in France. He died just a year after the publication of The Little Prince, on July 31, , during a solo flight over the Mediterranean Sea during World War II. Encourage students to engage in online research about his extraordinary life. He is particularly famous for his novel, Wind, Sand, and Stars that was first published in It was named the winner of the prestigious National Book Award in the United States. In honor of his memory, his family created the annual Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Medal for the best illustrated children’s book in France. The award is the French equivalent of the Caldecott Medal in the USA and the Kate Greenaway Prize in Great Britain. Based on information gained about his life, gifted children may create their own picture book biography of the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

The story of the child hero of The Little Prince is moved forward by his visits to planets with particularly exotic inhabitants that include a solitary street lamplighter and a geographer who knows nothing about the earth science of his home planet. After students have met these and additional inhabitants of previously unknown planets or asteroids, ask them to use their creativity to give the petite explorer yet one more visit to a newly discovered planet or asteroid and portray its solitary inhabitant as they imagine him to be in both words and drawings.

 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is especially well known for his reflective quotations from The Little Prince. The most famous of these is the wisdom of the untamed fox that the child meets upon his arrival on the Planet Earth. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Elicit online searches by children fo

Since its publication in , Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince has been charming little ones with its inventive story, whimsical watercolors, and snide comments about adults. “I have spent lots of time with grown-ups,” says the pilot. “I have seen them at close range . . . which hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.” 

The story has been translated into languages and continues to sell close to two million copies a year. It’s been adapted for stage, opera, radio, and anime. This year, a new movie version hits Netflix, featuring stop-motion animation and the voices of Jeff Bridges, Marion Cotillard, and Paul Rudd.

If you’ve only encountered Saint-Exupéry (san-tex-oo-pear-ee) by reading The Little Prince with a child or in French class, there’s more to explore. A son of France, Saint-Exupéry never managed to learn English, but his key works are available in translation. The same philosophical meditations about love, exploration, and the purpose of life appear in a more grown-up form in his novels, albeit without sheep, foxes, snakes, and precocious princes.

Born in Lyon, France, in to an aristocratic Catholic family, Saint-Exupéry was too young to fight in the First World War, and spent those years at a private school in Switzerland. After the war, he sat for the exam to gain entrance into France’s naval academy and failed both times, perhaps on purpose. A period studying architecture at École des Beaux-Arts failed to produce a degree. After knocking around Paris and testing his widowed mother’s patience and bank account, Saint-Exupéry entered the French army. While posted near Strasbourg, he took his first flying lessons. He was hooked.

Securing a transfer to the French Air Force, Saint-Exupéry finished his pilot’s training at an airfield outside of Casablanca, Morocco, in He found his way back to Paris, was assigned to the 34th Aviation regiment at Le Bourget airfield, and fell in love with Lo

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Saint-Exupéry: A Biography

The life story of the daring French aviator who became one of the twentieth century's most beloved authors.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared at age forty-four during a reconnaissance flight over southern France. At the time he was best known for a career of daring flights over the Sahara, the Pyrenees, and Patagonia and for his contributions to the science of aviation. But the solitary hours he spent above the earth in open cockpit airplanes gave birth to a more famous legacy, a series of enchanting, autobiographical novels and the classic story The Little Prince, still the most translated book in the French language.

An impoverished aristocrat from one of France's oldest families, Saint-Exupéry moved at age twenty-seven to the western Sahara Desert, to live alone in a plank shack and manage the way station for the Aéropostale, the French mail service. His careers as a novelist and an aviator were born here, and his life once he returned to Europe was defined—with brilliant and catastrophic results—by the sense of isolated fascination and curiosity he developed in the desert.

Reviews and Praise

For those, like myself, who knew next to nothing about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, his image was always an uneasy mixture of nauseating whimsy (“The Little Prince”) and romantic derring-do (“Night Flight” and “Wind, Sand and Stars”). It is Stacy Schiff’s achievement in “Saint-Exupéry: A Biography” (Knopf; $30) not only to explain this apparent contradiction but to bring a legend alive. On the one hand, Saint-Exupéry was one of the great pioneers of aviation, a hero of France, and the most widely translated author in the French language, and, on the other, a member of that gruesome tribe—the Boys Who Never Grow Up. For Saint-Ex, as he was known to his colleagues, childhood was a lost golden age, its haunting memory both a blessing and a curse.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons in , into a family of minor nobility. His father, Jean de Saint-Exupéry, who worked for an insurance company, died before Antoine was four, and the five Saint-Exupéry children were brought up in two beautiful châteaus—one, at Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, belonging to a great-aunt, and the other, near Saint-Tropez, to their maternal grandparents. It was in the former, with its mysterious attics and handsome, wooded park, that Antoine created what he described as “the secret kingdom” of his childhood, his “interior world of roses and fairies.” All his life, he was dogged by nostalgia for his early years. Well into adulthood, he wrote, “This world of childhood memories will always seem to me hopelessly more real than the other.”

The little Saint-Exupérys were indulged by their mother, Marie, who was loving, pious, and unceasingly attentive. The children were notorious in the neighborhood for unruly behavior, and Antoine, with his head of golden curls, was the most willful and unruly of them all. In tune with the times, he was fascinated by early experiments in flight and, at the age of twelve, attempted to construct an airborne bicycle. He also read avidly—his particular favorites were Jul