The Little Prince: And Letter to a Hostage

Description

Antoine de Saint-Exupery's timeless tale of love and loneliness, now widely available in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time Antoine de Saint-Exupery first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean Sea during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power. The narrator is a pilot downed in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the miraculous appearance of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, one confined only by the limits of the imagination, by the horizon of a child's wonder...

Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Author, Illustrator) Writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944), was born into an aristocratic French family at the turn of the century. Saint-Exupery was preoccupied with aviation from a young age; a passion which would lead him into the French Air Force. His first two books, Southern Mail and Night Flight, are distinguished by a poetic evocation of the romance and discipline of flying. Later works, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Flight to Arras, stress his humanistic philosophy. Saint-Exupery's popular children's book The Little Prince is also read by adults for its allegorical meaning. In 1944, Saint-Exupery's plane disappeared during a mission in World War II.