I am stunned at the many negative reviews of this book!

I find it the most expressive, engaging, revealing biography I have every read and I have read a boatload.

I am only a third of the way through it and constantly marvel at how much the author conveys in such a conversational, lyrical style. His was a remarkable life and she does full justice to it.

It is dense and there is a lot of words in small print. But, every word and every sentence conveys so much, without extraneous verbiage.

I started the book because I became fascinated with the wisdom of "The Little Prince" and wanted to know more about this man.

I just started reading and found myself mesmerized by the deftly crafted language, the high bit density of information and the amazingly funny, revealing, insightful stories on virtually every page! I was a hundred pages into before it occurred to me to read about the author and discover her remarkable credentials. Her skills are evident on every page, in every sentence.

One could make a huge feature film out of this book and never hire a scriptwriter as the producer/director/cinematographer need only lift passages from this book and film it.

I strongly recommend this book. Even if you do not become the fan of Saint-Exupéry that I have become, you will become a fan of Ms. Schiff.

And, the history, war, airplane, technology buffs will be delighted.

And, I now know what the millions of kids wearing Aéropostale gear do not!

Great story, well-written, except too long!

Sometimes I wondered whether I wouldn't have been better off with a less detailed biography, but then another gem of his life would turn up and I'd read on happily. It is hard going sometimes, but gives as full a picture as I think anyone could give.
I also wonder whether I should try again to read The Wisdom of the Sands - but read it as showing his state of mind in his last years, rather than for the philosophical work he meant it to be.
He was the kind of person that I am grateful exists in the world, but that I wouldn't necessarily like to personally know. Too much hard work.

ETA: No pictures in my edition. Although there are photographic credits for photos that should be after page 180. Someone stuffed up.

As a child, I loved The Little Prince, and as a teenager I revisited it and saw it as the wonderful imaginative creation it is. Later, I read the book to my children, and though I knew a little about Saint-Exupery, my interest in him grew, and I bought this book to learn more. This has led, by the way to a lifelong interest in things French, which has been facilitated by my professional life; I have worked with Frenchmen and women on and off for the last twenty years, and have found them, despite American stereotypes, to be easier to work with than either Brits or Germans, and they are much better hosts as well. But I digress. Saint-Ex was a pioneer in aviation in France in the '20's and '30's, and he had many hair-raising experiences flying to French Morocco, and one of those experiences formed part of the basis for The Little Prince. Stacy Schiff was a finalist for the Pulitzer for this book, and won the prize for her next book, and this book is full of her deep thinking and wonderfully crafted prose. Schiff deals with his writing, of course, but she brings out his life as an aviator and a member of the Free French forces. Saint-Ex was a brave, principled man who died flying combat missions the month after D-Day in support of the invasion forces in southern France. But he was also a fun, humorous man who loved jokes, and was a good friend and husband. I loved this book, and as a reader, one ends up loving Saint-Ex as well. Actually, writing this long-delayed review has reminded me I need to read some more of Stacy Schiff's books, and maybe re-read her Saint-Exupery.

Schiff offers some of the most uninspired prose I've read recently. Catch a glimpse of the life of Saint-Ex from the first chapter, and leave it. I should have done that.

When I told my wife I was reading the biography of Antione de Saint-Exupery, she really couldn't fathom why I pick the books I read. But really, there is rhyme and reason to them. I bought a copy of "The Little Prince" waaaaay back in the day when I worked at Barnes and Noble. It sat on my shelf unread. When I finally got around to reading it last year, I couldn't put the book down, and I found myself reading the beautiful passages, about the Prince's rose that was waiting for him, about his carefully rakes baobob trees, and the fox he had tamed. At the end, I found myself wanting to know, who was the man who had written this? The man who had written:

"Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for children to have to provide explanations over and over again."

"For me you're only a little boy just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you have no need of me, either. For you I'm only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we'll need each other."

"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."

I could discover very little about de Exupery from the dust jacket of my copy of "The Little Prince." Only that he had disappeared on a flight over France during World War II. He managed to capture so many beautiful truths. He must have been a deeply spiritual person. When Netflix finally released their beautiful adaptation of "The Little Prince", with its beautiful re-telling through the eyes of a girl with a forgetful and quixotic old man living next door (highly recommend watching it, if you haven't. I love the competing messages from Wirth academy ['Make yourself essential'] and the message of the Prince ['anything essential is invisible to the eyes']), I was reminded that I still needed to find out about the man behind the book.

So I found this biography, and checked it out from my university library. As I read, I was at first worried that it was poorly written; it seemed to be a mere collection of dusty biographical facts and figures. I had a hard time keeping track of names and places-- a common difficulty, something a good biographer has to manage. And the French names made it even worse! I'm fluent in German, and I like it because it is compact. French has all these unnecessary letters making it all too fluffy.

But as I began to read, I began to learn more about this curious man. I felt drawn to de Exupery, because he was an outsider, he had a hard time fitting in and conforming to outside norms (funny, I touted my favorite book of all time as "Catcher in the Rye" for so long, with Holden Caulfield's calling grownups "phonies."). He often was a man of two worlds. He was a pilot, an adventurer and member of a brotherhood. But he was also a writer. Both felt sides often felt betrayed when his other life interfered with their own. I liked this summary by the biographer of one of his last works that I think captures this double life well: "Perhaps because he lived so much tangled up in paradox Saint-Exupery was fated to be misconstrued. He slips through nets, embraces inconsistencies. As a pioneer, he lived in teh past, as a man of sicence, he believed above all in instinct; as a writer, he mistrusted language-- and intellectuals." I felt drawn to that, because I find so much value in these people who can be a part of two worlds, and hopefully draw them closer together.

I found out that de Exupery was a deeply spiritual person, but it seemed he was always in pursuit of virtue, he wanted to teach principles, but he had a hard time living them himself, and was too restless to settle down to any organized religion. Near the end of his life, he said that after the war, he planned to retire to a monastery. Some found his attempts at philosophizing amateur, but I from what I have read, I find it deeply moving, and something I think the world could use a little more of. I liked the biographer's summary of his spiritual quest: "It represents a piece of spiritual ground marked out by a weary man with a vestigial sense of Catholicism and an innate sense of responsibility who has lived a life thirsting for the values but free of the bounds of both."

One thing I did realize though, was that when you outright reject the world of grown-ups, you miss out on a lot. Saint Ex seemed to be very irresponsible, and didn't realize how his actions affected others. He was a daydreamer and adventurer. He was constantly borrowing exorbitant amounts of money from his mother, eventually driving her to bankruptcy. He failed classes one after the other. When World War I reached Paris, instead of getting to safety, he ran to the top of the building to watch the firework show in the sky. They again captured this compromise well in the film-- growing up, but always remembering what it was like to be a child.

One of the most exciting historical aspects of the book was the rise of flight, from its very beginnings as the Wright Brothers showed off their invention in France, to the increasingly modern aircraft in World War II. This all happened during Saint Ex's time as a pilot. The glory days of the French air mail company Aeropostale are amazing! Saint Ex ran mail flights between France and North Africa on a regular basis. He was also stantioned in Brazil and Argentina for a time. Back in those days, it wasn't uncommon for the planes to fail-- sometimes one out of three flights were a crash! But you survived, waited for another pilot to come pick you up, and you continued on. Saint Ex actually was a bit of a second-class pilot. And some point out that he got most of his fame as a pilot and author from his brilliant crashes. The events of "The Little Prince" are based on a famous crash in the Libyan desert! Unfortunately, Saint Ex didn't age well as a pilot; as things became increasingly more automated, he didn't keep up with the technology. He complained, "We are preparing a world capable of producing 5000 perfectly assembly-line pianos a day, but incapable of cultivating a worthy pianist."

I was saddened by the deep sense of loneliness that Saint Ex experienced throughout his life. He never seemed to have a completely fulfilling relationship, and no one to completely understand him. Anne Lindbergh said the line from "The Little Prince" that summarized his life, was when the Prince said that out on his asteroid, he had no one to talk to. In his last days, he told his acquaintances that he had a brilliant indifference to life, and that he wanted to die in action-- which he did. I feel inspired by his life, and want to incorporate his ideals, but I also feel that we can learn from his errors as well. His life to me shows that romanticism on its own can't hold water.



Thinking it was a good idea to take a lion cub home on a flight back to France.
Being unfamiliar with seaplanes, incorrectly going in for a dive and crashing into a lake and nearly drowning.
Overly excited to try for a 150,000 franc prize for a non-stop flight from Paris to Saigon, forget to sleep for two days, and then crashing in the Libyan desert.
Virtually getting all your fame as an aviator from crashing.
Thinking it's a good idea to draw pictures while you fly instead of looking at the controls.


He learned an enourmous amount from his two insular years marked by purposelessness, loneliness, homelessness. He grew more and more impatient with the comfortable life out of which he had, sometimes unintentionally, so many times now opted. The unpaid bills, the uncertain future, the unhappy heart, the vanishing youth were godsends; they were the first labors to teach him what cyclones and sandstorms and a fledgling mail service would, in years to come, appear to have taught him... Just as only an ex-loner could convincingly sing the praises of cameraderie, only a man who had very nearly fallen through the cracks of the system could write with passion of the tragedy of wasted potential.

For years Saint Exupery had lobbied for financial support with the plea that he could not live at odds with the world... It was precisely the opposite advice Flaubert had offered the aspiring ninetheenth-century writer: Break with the world. Saint Exupery, the idler who can to appreciate the preeminence of action, the indulged, profligate son who would make a near-religious appeal for the stoic, responsible life, began after to miserable years to see the wisdom in it. An aristocrat in a republic that no longer had a use for one, he was from the start at odds with his world.

Under the weight of greater responsibility, yoked into a team, he began to rise above his melancholy. It is not easy to resist the personal war, and Saint-Exupery-- who may have needed these structures more than most... bought in hook, like, and sinker. Though the religious trappings were there for all to see, he began to distill and romanticize the spiritual dimensions of his new life. This time the nonjoiner-- having found a cause worthy of his ideals, or simply having run out of options-- became a zealot.

IF Saint-Exupery's analysis of his fellow commuters rings like an indictment it should be heard more as a loud sigh of relief. Any man could succumb to this fate, as the pilot well knew. If he seemed to recoil from these men it was with the terror of recognition; he flinched as Henry V might from a Falstaff. He would not end either as a sedentary or as a gigolo, a broken man in a sedate line of work.

As much as he was a man of the people, despite his condemnation of the Parisian drawing rooms... there was, in fact, a decidedly undemocratic ring to Saint-Exupery's humanitarian vision. On the one hand he claimed to admire above all else the steady-working gardener, the devoted mother of five. On the other hand he loathed all that reeked of subjugation of the individual to the task. His very belief in a cosmic gardener on earth was elitist... He knew it was the universal that bound men together but he never stopped despairing of the baseness of that standard, could not understand why it was Parandello instead of Ibsen, jazz instead of Mozart, a cheap print instead of van Gogh or a Cezanne that won out. He loved the barracks but generally lived apart... He relished his separateness the way another man might relish his particule.

"That he kept his mind on the gas consumption while pondering the mysteries of the universe? How can he navigate by stars when they are to him 'the frozen glitter of diamonds?'" Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Saint EX

"Pilots meet if they are fighting to deliver the same mail; the Brown Shirts, if they are offering their lives to the same Hitler; the mountain climbers, if they are aiming for the same peak. Men do not unite by moving toward each other directly but only by losing themselves in the same god."

Writing of such moments he was more than ever a man distinctly out of step with his time, searching for teh common bond while those around him were busily clarifying their political differences... He had never been a believer in systems-- his was an overweening faith that life lay in the contradictions, not in the formulae, in the doubting, not the certainties, the needs rather than the riches-- and political parties seemed to him little more than artificial structures designed to save man from his loneliness.

"I condemn any school of thought which-- for coherency's sake-- is forced to reduce the enemy army to a pack of pillaging, imbecilic peons."

"The difference between an American cookbook and a French one is that the former is very accurate and the second exceedingly vague. A French recipe seldom tells you how many ounces of butter to use to make crepes Suzette, or how many spoonfuls of oil should go into a salad dressing... American recipes look like doctors' prescriptions."
Raoul de Roussy de Sales

"The earth teaches us more about ourselves than do all the books. Because it resists us. Man discovers himself when he measures himself against the obstacle. But to do so he needs a tool, a saw, or a plow. The farmer, in his labor, slowly coaxes out a few of nature's secrets, and the truths he unearths are universal. In the same way the airplane, tool of the airlines, involves man in all the old problems."

"Liberty: the ability to defy probbability"

It represents a piece of spiritual ground marked out by a weary man with a vestigial sense of Catholicism and an innate sense of responsibility who has lived a life thirsting for the values but free of the bounds of both.

Perhaps because he lived so much tangled up in paradox Saint-Exupery was fated to be misconstrued. He slips through nets, embraces inconsistencies. As a pioneer, he lived in teh past, as a man of sicence, he believed above all in instinct; as a writer, he mistrusted language-- and intellectuals.

I couldn't finish this book. She would mention points about Exupery's life that made me think "why is she writing about this? Who really cares?"

I'm so glad I read this book and discovered Schiff, got to know Saint-Exupery better, and especially, came to a greater appreciation of Saint-Exupery's writing. It completes a beautiful round when you find out that a French fisherman found his plane off the coast of France having caught Consuelo's bracelet in his fishing net.

I was most appreciative of Schiff's handling of the relationship with Anne Morrow-Lindbergh. It was shown respectfully and tenderly, and wasn't dwelled on.

It's a rare biography that enlarges your appreciation for the individual, even though it presents some untoward details (we all have those).

Saint-Exupery is one of my heroes, and he's plainly one of Stacy Schiff's, too. However, she also makes it clear he was a complicated man, and not always easy to live with.

Aux yeux des aviateurs qui l'ont connu , Antoine de Saint-Exupéry était un écrivain. Aux yeux des auteurs de son époque, il était plutôt un pilote. D'après son biographe Stacy Schiff, ses plus grandes aventures ont été dans le lit, mais elle considère tous les cotés de Saint-Exupèry. De cette manière, son le livre de Schiff présente aussi des excellents récits des parcours de Saint-Exupéry dans la littérature et dans l'aviation.
Entre 1926 et 1933 et Saint-Exupéry a été un pilot chez Aéropostale une des toute premières compagnies au monde à offrir des services de livraison de courrier par avion. Durant cette période il a fait des vols surtout en Afrique et en Amérique Latine. Après la faillite d'Aéropostale, Saint-Exupéry a travaillé comme pilote d'essai et de journaliste. Il s'est engagé dans l'Air Force française en 1939. Il est mort en juillet 1944 dans le service de l'Air Force de la France libre.
Pendant sa carrière de pilote, Saint-Exupéry a été impliqué dans beaucoup d'écrasements qu'il a par la suite décrit dans ses romans. Sa vie romantique a été semé de nombreuses catastrophes. Il faut saluer Schiff qui réussit à construire un narratif de cette série des désastres qui lit comme un roman. Même le dénouement semble être logique. Heureusement la biographie de Schiff est sortie sept ans avant la découverte en 2003 de l'épave de l'avion que piloter Saint-Exupéry qui n'a pas tellement éclairer les circonstances de sa mort et aura miné l'excellent histoire racontée par Schiff.
Un autre point fort du livre est l'histoire de le a première époque des services postaux par avion qui a été marqué par un progrès rapide la technologie aéronautique et des défis financiers énormes.
Schiff semble aussi bien connaitre les milieux littéraires que fréquenté Saint-Exupéry. Quand elle mentionne des auteurs tels qu'André Gide, Drieu la Rochelle, André Maurois, Blaise Cendrars ou André Malraux, on a toujours l'impression qu'elle connait bien leurs œuvres.
Finalement, Schiff explique très bien pour un public américain le contexte historique. Notamment, Schiff donne une exposition magistrale de l'évolution des idées politiques de Saint-Exupéry après la chute de la France. D'abord Saint-Exupéry mettait ses espoirs sur Pétain. Ensuite, il s'est rallié à France libre mené par Henri Giraud. Il n'a jamais aimé de Gaulle et a été déçu quand de Gaulle a pris les reins de pouvoir de l'organisation de Giraud.
Les meilleures chapitres son ceux qui sont consacrés aux quatre dernières années de la vie de Saint-Exupéry. Pendant cette période, il vivait entouré d'Anglophones d'abord à New York et ensuite en Afrique du nord. (L'Air Force de la France libre a été dans les faits une unité de l'Air Force américaine qui volait avec des avions américains à partir des bases américaines.) Le fait qu'il y avait beaucoup de personnes qui parlaient bien l'anglais pendant cette époque semble avoir faciliter la tache de Schiff.
"Saint-Exupéry: A Biography" est un excellent livre qui malheureusement ne semble pas être disponible en francais.

تجربه جالبی از اشنا شدن با فضای ذهنی و دغدغه های زندگی نویسنده میده. اما کتاب بعضی جاها بیش از حد طولانی شده با توصیفات و ستایش های نویسنده
در باره اگزوپری. البته در کل روال داستانیش خسته کننده نمیشه . غلط های املایی زیاد داره که امیدوارم تو نسخه های بعدی درستش کنن

My hero came to life, and he is more wonderful and terrible than I ever imagined. The Little Prince; A Sense of Life; Wind, Sand, and Stars; Flight to Arras; Night Flight; Saint-Exupery changed me profoundly and forever. Reading Schiff's biography is like stepping into a time machine and getting a first-hand account of the first half of the 20th century, the start of which coincided with the year of Saint-Exupery's birth.
"He made a virtue of the obstacle; he knew, or discovered, that grandeur lurks in unexpected places. From a decidedly earthbound life he culled the loftier moments and the best of these, with much effort, he committed to the page. The work adds up only to an armful, some of it dated, much of it flawed. Bu it is all of it rich in spirit: it makes us want to overreach ourselves. It makes us dream."