during a speaking tour in support of France after its
armistice with
Germany. He started his work on the novella shortly after returning to the United States (Quebec, 1942). Upon the outbreak of the
Second World War, a laureate of several of France's highest literary awards and a successful pioneering aviator prior to the war, Saint-Exupéry initially flew with a reconnaissance squadron as a reserve military pilot in the ''
Armée de l'Air'' (French Air Force). He devoted himself to the book on mostly midnight shifts, usually starting at about 11 pm, fueled by helpings of
scrambled eggs on
English muffins,
gin and tonics,
Coca-Colas, cigarettes and numerous visits by friends and expatriates who dropped in to see their famous countryman. One of the visitors was his wife's Swiss writer paramour
Denis de Rougemont, who also modeled for a painting of the Little Prince lying on his stomach, feet and arms extended up in the air. De Rougemont would later help Consuelo write her autobiography,
The Tale of the Rose, as well as write his own biography of Saint-Exupéry. While the author's personal life was frequently chaotic, his creative process while writing was disciplined. Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the
Morgan Library and Museum which had obtained Saint-Exupéry's original manuscript in 1968, stated: "On the one hand, he had a clear vision for the shape, tone, and message of the story. On the other hand, he was ruthless about chopping out entire passages that just weren't quite right", eventually distilling the 30,000 word manuscript, accompanied by small illustrations and sketches, to approximately half its original length. The story, the curator added, was created when he was "an ex-patriate and distraught about what was going on in his country and in the world." The large white
Second French Empire-style mansion, hidden behind tall trees, afforded the writer a multitude of work environments, but he usually wrote at a large dining table. It also allowed him to alternately work on his writings and then on his sketches and watercolours for hours at a time, moving his armchair and paint easel from the library towards the parlor one room at a time in search of sunlight. His meditative view of sunsets at the Bevin House were incorporated in the book, where the prince visits a small planet with 43 daily sunsets, a planet where all that is needed to watch a sunset "is move your chair a few steps."{{refn| Saint-Exupéry was 43 the year the fable was published, and 44 the year he died. He originally wrote the story with 43 sunsets, but posthumous editions often quote '44 sunsets', possibly in tribute.
Manuscript The original 140-page
autograph manuscript of
The Little Prince, along with various drafts and trial drawings, were acquired from the author's close friend Silvia Hamilton in 1968 by curator Herbert Cahoon of the Pierpont Morgan Library (now
The Morgan Library & Museum) in
Manhattan, New York City. It is the only known surviving handwritten draft of the complete work. The manuscript's pages include large amounts of the author's prose that was
struck-through and therefore not published as part of the first edition. In addition to the manuscript, several
watercolour illustrations by the author are also held by the museum. They were not part of the first edition. The institution has marked both the 50th and 70th anniversaries of the novella's publication, along with the centenary celebration of the author's birth, with major exhibitions of
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's literary works. Physically, the manuscript's
onion skin media has become brittle and subject to damage. Saint-Exupéry's handwriting is described as being doctor-like, verging on indecipherable. The story's keynote
aphorism, ("One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye") was reworded and rewritten some 15 times before achieving its final phrasing. Saint-Exupéry also used a
Dictaphone recorder to produce oral drafts for his typist. His initial 30,000-word working manuscript was distilled to less than half its original size through laborious editing sessions. Multiple versions of its many pages were created and its prose then polished over several drafts, with the author occasionally telephoning friends at 2:00 a.m. to solicit opinions on his newly written passages. Many pages and illustrations were cut from the finished work as he sought to maintain a sense of ambiguity to the story's theme and messages. Included among the deletions in its 17th chapter were references to locales in New York, such as the
Rockefeller Center and
Long Island. Other deleted pages described the prince's
vegetarian diet and the garden on his home asteroid that included
beans,
radishes,
potatoes and
tomatoes, but which lacked fruit trees that might have overwhelmed the prince's planetoid. Deleted chapters discussed visits to other asteroids occupied by a retailer brimming with marketing phrases, and an inventor whose creation could produce any object desired at a touch of its controls. Likely the result of the ongoing war in Europe weighing on Saint-Exupéry's shoulders, the author produced a sombre three-page
epilogue lamenting "On one star someone has lost a friend, on another someone is ill, on another someone is at war...", with the story's pilot-narrator noting of The Prince: "he sees all that. . . . For him, the night is hopeless. And for me, his friend, the night is also hopeless." The draft epilogue was also omitted from the novella's printing. In April 2012 a Parisian auction house announced the discovery of two previously unknown draft manuscript pages that included new text. In the newly discovered material the Prince meets his first Earthling after his arrival. The person he meets is an "ambassador of the human spirit". The ambassador is too busy to talk, saying he is searching for a missing six letter word: "I am looking for a six-letter word that starts with G that means 'gargling' ", he says. Saint-Exupéry's text does not say what the word is, but experts believe it could be "guerre" (or "war"). The novella thus takes a more politicized tack with an anti-war sentiment, as 'to gargle' in French is an informal reference to 'honour', which the author may have viewed as a key factor in military confrontations between nations.
Dedication Saint-Exupéry met
Léon Werth (1878–1955), a writer and art critic, in 1931. Werth soon became Saint-Exupery's closest friend outside of his
Aeropostale associates. Werth was an anarchist, a leftist
Bolshevik supporter
of Jewish descent, twenty-two years older than Saint-Exupéry. Saint-Exupéry dedicated two books to him, ''
(Letter to a Hostage
) and Le Petit Prince
(The Little Prince
), and referred to Werth in three more of his works. At the beginning of the Second World War while writing The Little Prince'', Saint-Exupéry lived in his downtown New York City apartment, thinking of his native France and his friends. Werth spent the war unobtrusively in
Saint-Amour, his village in the
Jura, a mountainous region near Switzerland where he was "alone, cold and hungry", a place that had few polite words for French refugees. Werth appears in the preamble to the novella, where Saint-Exupéry dedicates the book to him: Saint-Exupéry's aircraft disappeared over the Mediterranean in July 1944. The following month, Werth learned of his friend's disappearance from a radio broadcast. Without having yet heard of
The Little Prince, in November, Werth discovered that Saint-Exupéry had published a fable the previous year in the U.S., which he had illustrated himself, and that it was dedicated to him. At the end of the
Second World War, which Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did not live to see, Werth said: "Peace, without Tonio (Saint-Exupéry) isn't entirely peace." Werth did not see the text for which he was so responsible until five months after his friend's death, when Saint-Exupéry's French publisher,
Gallimard, sent him a special edition. Werth died in
Paris in 1955.
Illustrations All of the novella's simple but elegant
watercolour illustrations, which were integral to the story, were painted by
Saint-Exupéry. He had studied architecture as a young adult but nevertheless could not be considered an artist – which he self-mockingly alluded to in the novella's introduction. Several of his illustrations were painted on the wrong side of the delicate onion skin paper that he used as his medium of choice. As with some of his draft manuscripts, he occasionally gave away preliminary sketches to close friends and colleagues; others were even recovered as crumpled balls from the floors in the cockpits he flew.{{refn| On one of Saint-Exupéry's flights his aircraft engine started failing. His aircraft mechanic onboard later recalled that Saint-Exupéry was completely calm, "Saint-Ex simply started doodling cartoons which he handed back to me with a big grin." An unrepentant lifelong doodler and sketcher, Saint-Exupéry had for many years sketched little people on his napkins, tablecloths, letters to paramours and friends, lined notebooks and other scraps of paper. Early figures took on a multitude of appearances, engaged in a variety of tasks. Some appeared as doll-like figures, baby puffins, angels with wings, and even a figure similar to that in
Robert Crumb's
Keep On Truckin' of 1968. In a 1940 letter to a friend, he sketched a character with his own thinning hair, sporting a bow tie, viewed as a boyish alter-ego, and he later gave a similar doodle to Elizabeth Reynal at his New York publisher's office. Most often the diminutive figure was expressed as "...a slip of a boy with a turned up nose, lots of hair, long baggy pants that were too short for him and with a long scarf that whipped in the wind. Usually the boy had a puzzled expression... [T]his boy Saint-Exupéry came to think of as "the little prince", and he was usually found standing on top of a tiny planet. Most of the time he was alone, sometimes walking up a path. Sometimes there was a single flower on the planet." His characters were frequently seen chasing butterflies; when asked why they did so, Saint-Exupéry, who thought of the figures as his alter-egos, replied that they were actually pursuing a "realistic ideal". Saint-Exupéry eventually settled on the image of the young, precocious child with curly blond hair, an image which would become the subject of speculations as to its source. One "most striking" illustration depicted the pilot-narrator asleep beside his stranded plane prior to the prince's arrival. Although images of the narrator were created for the story, none survived Saint-Exupéry's editing process. To mark both the 50th and 70th anniversaries of ''The Little Prince's'' publication, the
Morgan Library and Museum mounted major exhibitions of Saint-Exupéry's draft manuscript, preparatory drawings, and similar materials that it had obtained earlier from a variety of sources. One major source was an intimate friend of his in New York City, Silvia Hamilton (later, Reinhardt), to whom the author gave his working manuscript just prior to returning to Algiers to resume his work as a
Free French Air Force pilot. Hamilton's black
poodle, Mocha, is believed to have been the model for the Little Prince's sheep, with a
Raggedy Ann type doll helping as a stand-in for the prince. Additionally, a pet
boxer, Hannibal, that Hamilton gave to him as a gift may have been the model for the story's desert fox and its tiger. A museum representative stated that the novella's final drawings were lost. Seven unpublished drawings for the book were also displayed at the museum's exhibit, including fearsome looking baobab trees ready to destroy the prince's home asteroid, as well as a picture of the story's narrator, the forlorn pilot, sleeping next to his aircraft. That image was likely omitted to avoid giving the story a 'literalness' that would distract its readers, according to one of the Morgan Library's staff. According to Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan, "[t]he image evokes Saint-Exupéry's own experience of awakening in an isolated, mysterious place. You can almost imagine him wandering without much food and water and conjuring up the character of the Little Prince." Another reviewer noted that the author "chose the best illustrations... to maintain the ethereal tone he wanted his story to exude. Choosing between ambiguity and literal text and illustrations, Saint-Exupéry chose in every case to obfuscate." Not a single drawing of the story's narrator–pilot survived the author's editing process; "he was very good at excising what was not essential to his story". In 2001 Japanese researcher Yoshitsugu Kunugiyama surmised that the cover illustration Saint-Exupéry painted for
Le Petit Prince deliberately depicted a stellar arrangement created to celebrate the author's own centennial of birth. According to Kunugiyama, the cover art chosen from one of Saint-Exupéry's watercolour illustrations contained the planets
Saturn and
Jupiter, plus the star
Aldebaran, arranged as an
isosceles triangle, a celestial configuration which occurred in the early 1940s, and which he likely knew would next reoccur in the year 2000. Saint-Exupéry possessed superior mathematical skills and was a master
celestial navigator, a vocation he had studied at
Salon-de-Provence with the
''Armée de l'Air'' (French Air Force).
Post-publication Stacy Schiff, one of
Saint-Exupéry's principal biographers, wrote of him and his most famous work, "rarely have an author and a character been so intimately bound together as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his Little Prince", and remarking of their dual fates, "the two remain tangled together, twin innocents who fell from the sky". Another noted that the novella's mystique was "enhanced by the parallel between author and subject: imperious innocents whose lives consist of equal parts flight and failed love, who fall to earth, are little impressed with what they find here and ultimately disappear without a trace." Only weeks after his novella was first published in April 1943, despite his wife's pleadings and before Saint-Exupéry had received any of its royalties (he never would), the author-aviator joined the
Free French Forces. He would remain immensely proud of
The Little Prince, and almost always kept a personal copy with him which he often read to others during the war. As part of a 32-ship military convoy he voyaged to
North Africa where he rejoined his old squadron to fight with the
Allies, resuming his work as a reconnaissance pilot despite the best efforts of his friends, colleagues and fellow airmen who could not prevent him from flying.{{refn| Following one of his crashes in a sophisticated single-pilot spy aircraft that resulted in him being grounded, Saint-Exupéry spared no effort in his campaign to return to active combat flying duty. He utilized all his contacts and powers of persuasion to overcome his age and physical handicap barriers, which would have completely barred an ordinary patriot from serving as a war pilot. Instrumental in his reinstatement was an agreement he proposed to
John Phillips, a fluently bilingual
Life Magazine correspondent in February 1944, where Saint-Exupéry committed to "write, and I'll donate what I do to you, for your publication, if you get me reinstated into my squadron." Phillips later met with a high-level U.S. Army Air Forces press officer in Italy, Colonel John Reagan McCrary, who conveyed the
Life Magazine request to General Eaker. Eaker's approval for Saint-Exupéry's return to flying status would be made "not through favoritism, but through exception." The brutalized French, it was noted, would cut a German's throat "probably with more relish than anybody." Various sources state that his final flight was either his seventh, eight, ninth, or even his tenth covert reconnaissance mission. He volunteered for almost every such proposed mission submitted to his squadron, and protested fiercely after being grounded following his second sortie which ended with a demolished P-38. His connections in high places, plus a publishing agreement with
Life Magazine, were instrumental in having the grounding order against him lifted. For some time Saint-Exupéry's friends, colleagues, and compatriots were actively working to keep the aging, accident-prone author grounded, out of harm's way.
Reception Many of the book's initial reviewers were flummoxed by the fable's multi-layered story line and its morals, perhaps expecting a significantly more conventional story from one of France's leading writers. Its publisher had anticipated such reactions to a work that fell neither exclusively into a children's nor adults' literature classification.
The New York Times reviewer wrote shortly before its publication "What makes a good children's book? ...
The Little Prince, which is a fascinating fable for grown-ups [is] of conjectural value for boys and girls of 6, 8 and 10. [It] may very well be a book on the order of ''
Gulliver's Travels'', something that exists on two levels"; "Can you clutter up a narrative with paradox and irony and still hold the interest of 8 and 10-year olds?" Notwithstanding the story's duality, the review added that major portions of the story would probably still "capture the imagination of any child." Addressing whether it was written for children or adults,
Reynal & Hitchcock promoted it ambiguously, saying that as far as they were concerned "it's the new book by Saint-Exupéry", adding to its dustcover "There are few stories which in some way, in some degree, change the world forever for their readers. This is one." Others were not shy in offering their praise. Austin Stevens, also of
The New York Times, stated that the story possessed "...large portions of the Saint-Exupéry philosophy and poetic spirit. In a way it's a sort of
credo." P. L. Travers, author of the
Mary Poppins series of children books, wrote in a
New York Herald Tribune review: "
The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam. It will strike them in some place that is not the mind and glow there until the time comes for them to comprehend it." British journalist Neil Clark, in
The American Conservative in 2009, offered an expansive view of Saint-Exupéry's overall work by commenting that it provides a "…bird's eye view of humanity [and] contains some of the most profound observations on the human condition ever written", and that the author's novella "doesn't merely express his contempt for selfishness and materialism [but] shows how life should be lived." The book enjoyed modest initial success, residing on
The New York Times Best Seller list for only two weeks, as opposed to his earlier 1939 English translation,
Wind, Sand and Stars which remained on the same list for nearly five months. As a
cultural icon, the novella regularly draws new readers and reviewers, selling almost two million copies annually and also spawning
numerous adaptations. Modern-day references to
The Little Prince include one from
The New York Times that describes it as "abstract" and "fabulistic". == Literary translations and printed editions ==