Antoine de Saint-Exupéry  was a French aviator and writer whose works are the unique testimony of a pilot and a warrior who looked at adventure and danger with a poet’s eyes. His fable Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) has become a modern classic.

Saint-Exupéry came from an impoverished aristocratic family. A poor student, he failed the entrance examination to the École Navale and then studied architecture for several months at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1921 he was conscripted into the French air force, and he qualified as a military pilot a year later. In 1926 he joined the Compagnie Latécoère in Toulouse and helped establish airmail routes over northwest Africa, the South Atlantic, and South America. In the 1930s he worked as a test pilot, a publicity attaché for Air France, and a reporter for Paris-Soir. In 1939, despite permanent disabilities resulting from serious flying accidents, he became a military reconnaissance pilot. After the fall of France (1940), he left for the United States; he remained there until 1943, when he resumed flying with his former squadron in the Mediterranean theatre. In 1944 he took off from an airfield in Corsica to conduct a reconnaissance mission over France and never returned. Sixty years later, wreckage raised from the seabed near Marseille was identified as belonging to his plane. It had probably been shot down by an enemy fighter, though the cause of the crash may never be known.