Saint-Exupéry: A Biography

by Stacy Schiff

Overview

The definitive biography of the most translated french writer of all time.

When he vanished in 1944—disappearing into thin air as the Little Prince does in his best-loved work—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was already a legend. His name is synonymous with the golden age of aviation, when pilots flew through desert sandstorms in open cockpits and without instruments, fired at by rebellious tribes. The author of many of the classics of aviation literature, he also wrote the children's classic The Little Prince, the most widely translated book in the French language. Stacy Schiff, with an infectious fascination for her subject, has brought Saint-Exupéry to life in this definitive, humane, and hugely entertaining biography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679403104
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/18/1994
Edition description:	1st ed
Pages:	525
Product dimensions:	6.89(w) x 9.55(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Stacy Schiff is the author of A Great Improvisation and Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), which won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Schiff lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

October 26, 1961

Place of Birth:

Adams, Massachusetts

Education:

B.A., Williams College, 1982

Website:

http://stacyschiff.com/

Table of Contents

Introduction

A King of Infinite Space

The Mother Country

Things in Heaven and Earth

Lost Horizons

Silver Linings

Walking on Air

Friends in High Places

The Swift Completion of Their Appointed Rounds

Toward the Country Where the Stones Fly

Brightness Falls

Beyond the Call of Duty

"Tayara Boum-Boum, Tayara Boum-Boum!"

Civil Evening Twilight

Where is France?

Resistance on Fifth Avenue

Anywhere Out of This World

Into Thin Air

Epilogue: Saint Antoine d?Exup?ry

What People are Saying About This

Phillip Lopate

Exemplary. What distinguishes this biography from so many others is the elegance, witty intelligence, and sure line-by-line pleasure of the writing.

Editorial Reviews

Born in 1900 into one of France's oldest families, impoverished aristocrat Antoine de Saint-Exupry 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-Exupry 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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Antoine de Saint-Exupry, heroic in flight, inept in everyday life, comes alive in this well-documented portrait by first-time author Schiff. Saint-Exupry spent his happiest days flying the mails for Aropostale 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 Ptain 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-Exupry.-Bob Ivey, Memphis State Univ., Tenn.

Library Journal

"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.

Donna Seaman

"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. " - Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher