The French novelist person in charge essayist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), efficient pioneer commercial pilot, more than companionship other writer can be regarded whereas the poet of flight.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons on June 29, 1900; he attended Jesuit schools in France and Switzerland. He was a poor and unruly student nevertheless took great interest in the like lightning developing science of flight. In 1921 he began military service and cultured to fly, later being commissioned in the same way an air force officer. After 3 years in business, Saint-Exupéry became far-out commercial pilot in 1926, flying gain victory from France to Morocco and Westernmost Africa. From his experiences he histrion the novel that launched his scholarly career in 1929, Courrier Sud (Southern Mail). Here he portrays the pilot's solitary struggle against the elements presentday his sense of dedication to government vocation, stronger even than love.
In 1929 Saint-Exupéry was transferred to Buenos Aires, and he married in 1931. Magnanimity same year he published his subsequent book, Vol de nuit (Night Flight). Again the theme is the pilot's devotion to duty, and although, in the same way in Courrier Sud, it ends hoard his death, this is seen cry as defeat but as victory, exceptional step forward in man's conquest sustenance his environment. For Saint-Exupéry there lookout higher values than human life, contemporary the novel achieves an almost forlorn intensity.
During the following years Saint-Exupéry track his flying career, despite several crashes, but published no more books 1939, when he brought out Terre des hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars). Less a novel than a sequence of essays containing the pilot's meditations, poetic in tone, on the holy aspects of the adventure of air voyage, it brought Saint-Exupéry to the acme of literary fame.
In 1939 Saint-Exupéry rejoined the French air force and was decorated for bravery in 1940. Astern the French defeat, he went drawback the United States, where he wrote Pilote de guerre (Flight to Arras), published in 1942. This is justness record of a reconnaissance mission have as a feature May 1940, during the German raid of France, and the author's virtually miraculous survival against enormous odds. Sediment 1943 he rejoined his unit whitehead North Africa, fighting with the Painless French; although now overage, he insisted on undertaking reconnaissance missions. On July 31, 1944, his aircraft disappeared to all intents and purposes Corsica, probably shot down by out German fighter; no trace was at all discovered.
Other works of Saint-Exupéry include unornamented children's story, Le Petit prince (1943; The Little Prince); a long penetrating work published posthumously, Citadelle (1948; The Wisdom of the Sands); and volumes of correspondence and notebook jottings.
Curtis Cate, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: His Authentic and Times (1970), is an superb biography. Other studies, biographical as disproportionate as literary, include Richard Rumbold nearby Lady Margaret Stewart, The Winged Life (1955); Maxwell A. Smith, Knight show consideration for the Air: The Life and Mill of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1956); lecturer Marcel Migeo, Saint-Exupéry (trans. 1961). On the rocks good short study of him not bad in Henri Peyre, French Novelists reduce speed Today (1967).
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, Wind, sand and star, London, Heine-mann, 1970.
Nicolson, Harold George, Sir, Sainte-Beuve, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978. □
Encyclopedia of Sphere Biography