October 3, 1994
Born in 1900 into one of France's oldest families, impoverished aristocrat Antoine de Saint-Exupery became a pioneer aviator, braving the Pyrenees, Patagonia and the Sahara, as well as serving as a mail pilot in the 1920s and '30s, and then turning his adventures into lyrical novels. The Little Prince, his children's fable for all ages, secured his fame. This captivating biography deftly separates the man from the myth, revealing an awkward, petulant idealist, an elitist who advocated oligarchy, a pilot known for his mishaps and absentmindedness, and an unhappily married adventurer whose abusive wife eventually reached an uneasy accommodation with his mistress. Fleeing German-occupied France for New York City in 1940, Saint-Exupery felt he was shirking his duty as a Frenchman; he attained the noble death he sought in 1944, missing in action on a reconnaissance flight over southern France. Schiff is a former senior editor at Simon & Schuster. Photos not seen by PW.
October 1, 1994
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, heroic in flight, inept in everyday life, comes alive in this well-documented portrait by first-time author Schiff. Saint-Exupery spent his happiest days flying the mails for Aeropostale during the 1920s. When he arrived in Algiers in 1943 after a painful stay in New York during the early days of World War II, where he completed The Little Prince, he believed that he was finished. He had refused to support either De Gaulle and the Free French or the Petain Vichy government and had expressed the desire to die for his country. In 1944 he died mysteriously in the cockpit of a wartime reconnaissance plane while flying a mission over Italy. Like his Little Prince, he had seen only 44 sunsets. A stimulating biography recommended to everyone with an interest in early aviation and Saint-Exupery.-Bob Ivey, Memphis State Univ., Tenn.
Starred review from November 15, 1994
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." This is from The Little Prince," a book that still sells 135,000 copies a year in America, 52 years after Saint-Exupery (1900-44) wrote it during one of his many tempestuous exiles from his homeland. Saint-Exupery himself has been largely forgotten, but Schiff has resurrected him in this invigoratingly witty, meticulous, and tenderhearted biography. After describing his "enchanted-garden childhood," Schiff goes on to create a vivid portrait of this "impoverished aristocrat." Dark-eyed, ungainly, bohemian, and romantic, Saint-Exupery never outgrew his boyhood passion for poetry, magic, and flying machines and was happiest as a mail pilot flying the Casablanca-Dakar route over the forbidding but liberating western Sahara, a landscape that shaped all of his fiction. A man adored by women, his tumultuous marriage to Consuelo Gomez Carrillo was legendary, as was his knack for getting himself into political hot water. A man brimming with dreams and sorrow, he disappeared into thin air in a plane crash as inevitable and enigmatic as the demise of his Little Prince. Schiff tells Saint-Exupery's adventure-filled and impassioned life story with remarkable skill and insight, sending us back to his books with renewed interest and compassion. ((Reviewed November 15, 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)