St exupery biography
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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 bea
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The Grown-Up Saint-Exupéry
Since its publication in , Antoine dem 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, musikdrama, 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,
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Stacy Schiff
Formats
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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 s