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Antoine De Saint Exupery Biography & Facts

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (UK: , US: , French: [ɑ̃twan də sɛ̃t‿ɛɡzypeʁi]; 29 June 1900 – c. 31 July 1944), was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator. He received several prestigious literary awards for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight (Vol de nuit). His works have been translated into many languages. Saint-Exupéry was a successful commercial pilot before World War II, working airmail routes in Europe, Africa, and South America. He joined the French Air Force at the start of the war, flying reconnaissance missions until France's armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised by the French Air Force, he travelled to the United States to help persuade its government to enter the war against Nazi Germany. Saint-Exupéry spent 28 months in the United States of America, during which he wrote three of his most important works, then joined the Free French Air Force in North Africa, even though he was far past the maximum age for such pilots and in declining health. He disappeared and is believed to have died while on a reconnaissance mission from the French island of Corsica over the Mediterranean on 31 July 1944. Although the wreckage of his plane was discovered off the coast of Marseille in 2000, the ultimate cause of the crash remains unknown. Youth and aviation Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon, France to an aristocratic Catholic family that could trace its lineage back several centuries. Their surname references the 5th-century bishop Saint Exuperius. He was the third of five children of the Viscountess Marie de Fonscolombe and Viscount Jean de Saint-Exupéry (1863–1904). His father, an executive of the Le Soleil (The Sun) insurance brokerage, died of a stroke in the train station of La Foux before Saint-Exupéry's 4th birthday. His father's death affected the entire family, transforming their status to that of "impoverished aristocrats".Saint-Exupéry had three sisters and a younger brother, François, who died at age 15 of rheumatic fever contracted while both were attending the Marianist College Villa St. Jean in Fribourg, Switzerland, during World War I. Saint-Exupéry attended to his brother, whom he claimed was his closest confidant, beside his death bed, and later wrote that François "...remained motionless for an instant. He did not cry out. He fell as gently as a [young] tree falls", imagery which would much later be recrafted into the climactic ending of The Little Prince. At the age of 17, now the only male in the family following the death of his brother, Saint-Exupéry soon assumed the role of a protector and took to consoling his family, despite still being distraught over his father's death.After twice failing his final exams at a preparatory Naval Academy, Saint-Exupéry entered the École des Beaux-Arts as an auditor to study architecture for 15 months, again without graduating, and then fell into the habit of accepting odd jobs. In 1921, Saint-Exupéry began his military service as a basic-rank soldier with the 2e Régiment de chasseurs à cheval (2nd Chasseurs à Cheval Regiment) and was sent to Neuhof, near Strasbourg. While there, he took private flying lessons and the following year was offered a transfer from the French Army to the French Air Force. He received his pilot's wings after being posted to the 37th Fighter Regiment in Casablanca, Morocco. Later, Saint-Exupéry was reposted to the 34th Aviation Regiment at Le Bourget on the outskirts of Paris, and then experienced the first of his many aircraft crashes. Saint-Exupéry, influenced by the urgings of the family of his fiancée, future novelist Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin, subsequently left the air force to take an office job. The couple ultimately broke off their engagement and he worked at several more odd jobs over the next few years.By 1926, Saint-Exupéry was flying again. He became one of the pioneers of international postal flight, in the days when aircraft had few instruments. Later, he complained that those who flew the more advanced aircraft had become more like accountants than pilots. He worked for Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar, and then also became the airline stopover manager for the Cape Juby airfield in the Spanish zone of South Morocco, in the Sahara. His duties included negotiating the safe release of downed fliers taken hostage by Saharan tribes, a perilous task that earned him his first Légion d'honneur from the French Government.In 1929, Saint-Exupéry was transferred to Argentina, where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina airline. He lived in Buenos Aires, in the Galería Güemes building. He surveyed new air routes across South America, negotiated agreements, and occasionally flew the airmail as well as search missions looking for downed fliers. This period of his life is briefly explored in Wings of Courage, an IMAX film by French director Jean-Jacques Annaud. Writing career Saint-Exupéry's first novella, L'Aviateur (The Aviator), was published in 1926 in a short-lived literary magazine, Le Navire d'Argent (The Silver Ship). In 1929, his first book, Courrier Sud (Southern Mail) was published. That same year, Saint-Exupéry flew the Casablanca–Dakar route.The 1931 publication of Night Flight established Saint-Exupéry as a rising star in the literary world. It was the first of his major works to gain widespread acclaim, and it won the prix Femina. The novel mirrored his experiences as a mail pilot and director of the Aeroposta Argentina. That same year, at Grasse, Saint-Exupéry married Consuelo Suncin (née Suncín Sandoval), a once-divorced, once-widowed Salvadoran writer and artist, who Saint-Exupéry described as having possessed a bohemian spirit and a "viper's tongue". Saint-Exupéry, would leave and then return to his wife many times—he saw her as both his muse, but, over the long term, the source of much of his angst. The relationship has been described as 'rocky', with Saint-Exupéry traveling frequently and indulging in numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé (1908–2003), known as "Nelly" and referred to as "Madame de B." in Saint-Exupéry biographies. Vogüé became Saint-Exupéry's literary executrix after his death and also wrote her own Saint-Exupéry biography under a pseudonym, Pierre Chevrier.Saint-Exupéry continued to write until the spring of 1943, when he left the United States with American troops bound for North Africa in the Second World War. Desert crash On 30 December 1935, at 2:45 am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry and his mechanic-navigator, André Prévot, crashed in the Libyan desert during an attempt to break the speed record in a Paris-to-Saigon air race and win a prize of 150,000 francs. The crash site is thought to have been near the Wadi Natrun valley, close to the Nile Delta.Both Saint-Exupéry and Prévot.... 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