Thoroughly researched biography of the enigmatic, brilliant aviator/writer aristocratic St. Exupery who seemed to get in his own way with his vulnerabilities. A good history of France leading into WW 2. Lends to a greater understanding of The Little Prince.

First off - the book cover looks like Saint-Exupery is taking a selfie of himself! Or is it just me...
I loved this bio by Stacy Schiff - I love all her work.
'Saint'Ex' was so delightfully eccentric, and I think I must be eccentric too because I found it so comforting to learn of his odd habits and being prone to distractions. I'm quite hopeless on both fronts.
Before I read this I thought of the author of The Little Prince as some kind of prophet and not even really a man, so it was wonderful to learn that he did have magical qualities, like his card tricks and ability to talk himself out of trouble.
His relationship with 'Madame de B' and her anonymity, as requested by her and honoured by Schiff, was very interesting to me. She is the executor of his literary estate.
I was sad that he lost his zest for life in his forties.
All in all, this is a wonderful book about a special person.

beautiful, unprecedented and erudite man in an Era

…quintessentially beautiful saga of a unique seeker in a fecund era that will never be repeated. Comparatively we maybe comfortable however stagnating and regressing in all aspects of physics, mathematics, music, civility and the other beux arts. Gadgets and lowest common denominator, consensus-majority thinking in human endeavor suffice for progress and innovation, serving only to expedite global blight, spawn melancholy and decadence. Sadly the progressive with corrupted science, political majority and re-concocted veritas are extinguishing native cultures, habitats and beauty artist and explorers revere.

Good writer but, subject didn’t interest me. I had to push my way through this book.

This book took me 10 years to read. I started it in 2010, got about half-way through, and just couldn't get past the slow parts. I picked it up again, where I left off, a few weeks ago and finally (finally!) plowed on to the end. I would originally have given the book 2 stars, but the research was well done and the story picked up after the dreadfully slow middle, so it ended up with 3 stars. If you're a true lover of French literature, and have a penchant for Le Petit Prince (which, unfortunately I do not, having only read it in high school French class), this may be a fun biography for you. Or, alternatively, if you're interested in early aviation from the French perspective, this will be interesting. I came away from this biography feeling sad for Antoine de Saint-Exupery because he really seemed to be a man born in the wrong time, but I didn't have much sympathy for him. The author's research, however, and documented notes and sources, was well done, and I think she brought her subject into perspective better than any prior treatment of the author's life. She also updated her 1994 research in 2005 with an Afterword that answers the mystery to Saint-Exupery's disappearance.

Ms. Schiff did her homework on this one. From the tiniest detail to her commentary on a complex French aviator and author. I am halfway through and enjoying every moment. The time period and subject are maybe more interesting because I have written a manuscript about one of Saint-Exupery's colleagues who was only a few years older and also wrote for the newspaper, Paris-Soir. But if you enjoy nonfiction from this time period, I highly recommend her fabulous biography.

他喜欢冒险，是高空之王。他情感细腻，是大地之子。他是理想主义者，是世界上最孤独的人。伟大者，皆孤独。

The Little Prince; [Copied from my Blog, Prohaska & Me ]

(Some months ago, on my new Kindle, I started reading Stacy Shiff's Bio of St. Exupery. (At the same time I reread The Little Prince.) During that time I went a little crazy and downloaded way too many books, too much ahead of my reading speed capacity for comfort. On that account, lately, I've put myself on a book-buying ban and am trying to catch up, concentrating on reading said Bio, and the horse book, to which I'll refer down the line; Raulff, Farewell to The Horse.)

I first became aware of The Little Prince sometime in 1961, when I saw it lying on a coffee table in the apartment of a friend. Perhaps it was when it first came out in English, in paperback. Was it a children's book? That wasn't clear to me, or perhaps to anyone. But my friend's girlfriend had bought it as a gift for him. She understood, I now know, that it was a poetic myth about love, disguised as a children's book.

My friend, who happened to look a bit like an adult version of the book's main character, had orange-gold curly hair and blue eyes, and he had a somewhat princely demeanor. We were both about eighteen at the time. Einar, that was my friend's name, wove the book into his myth about himself, which he created every day, and which changed through the years, but which had to do with Life-Style, Mysticism, getting stoned, getting hip, and being part of a new form of Bohemianism. The book became part of the literary canon of my particular microcosmic social set as we went through the sixties in hipster mode.(The better educated hipster, particularly in 1961, had the French version of the book.)

Perhaps I should insert a book list here, but let me suffice to say that for my small group it was the gospel according to Salinger, Kerouac, Wm. Goldman's The Temple of Gold, other books of varying import, and eventually, The Whole Earth Catalogue. ( One book in particular, though, that was noticeably absent in our clique, but present in many of the more egg-headed households and crash-pads that we visited as we slowly branched out socially, was that scary tome,Godel, Escher and Bach. I still feel bad about not being able to wrap my head around that one. )
[Time lapse..]
......I've finished the St. Exupery Bio now, having begun to read it with more focus and intensity, what with all the pressure on myself, from myself, and I am perversely pleased, (I have a past), to find that St. Ex, which his friends called him, had a mistress, (well didn't everybody?), who happened to be very rich, and married, and in the 1930s had an apartment on Beekman Place, in NYC, where the great Me was conceived though not born. (My parents moved when my mother was expecting, out of respect for the other tenants who didn't want a crying baby in the building). The parents had been living there for a few years and had many friends in the neighborhood including the great "Wild Bill" Donovan, who a few years later became head of the O.S.S.

The mistress, who was married, beautiful, and rich, and, like St. Ex., an official French aristocrat, was, in the Bio, given the discrete name Mrs. B. Before going on about Mrs. B. though, I should say that St. Ex also had a wife, and in fact she was the kind of woman every cult figure that I've ever identified with over the years always seems to have been; that woman who was Henry Miller's June, Frank Sinatra's Ava Gardner, Anais Nin's, well, June, Dali's Gala, and Ad "Femme Fatale" Infinitum. In short, a Hero's Wife, as Joseph Campbell would have had it. Saint Ex's wife was named Consuela, and by halfway through the Bio I was in love with her.

Mrs. B.'s real name was Helene, and in 1927 she had married Count Jean de Vogue, a friend of St. Ex. and fellow French Aristocrat, and thus Helene had become one of the richest women in France. Word of mouth has it that she and St. Ex. started hooking up around 1934.

He called her Nelly. It didn't take Consuela too long to find out about Nelly because St. Ex foolishly left some of her perfume scented love letters lying around.This led to tempestuousness on the part of the Latin Vixen, but that's sexist.Well, St. Ex. was sexist. Anyway, Consuela fooled around quite a bit too, particularly when St. Ex. was flying all over the hell-and-gone for Aeropostal and later the French Air Force.

St. Ex's circle paid little or no attention, it seems, to the ease with which Nelly crossed Nazi, Vichy, and other European borders, but in retrospect it began to seem that she might have been some sort of spy. That would have made it handy for her to have a Beekman Place Apartment and to be chummy with Wild Bill. Anyway, when I find out who's side she was really on, I'll make it a P.S.

How I got into the clutches of Nelly de Vogue and Consuela de St. Exupery goes something like this.

I read Emigre New York, by Jeffrey Mehlman, which was about the French community in NYC during the Second World War. How I came to that book was that I had been reading several books about Structuralism; Foucault, Lacan, et. al, and at the same time a book about Surrealism, and was intrigued to find that Max Ernst had befriended Levi-Strauss during that expatriate period. I find the interest that the two shared in American Indian artifacts, among other things, interesting, and also the the ties between Structuralism and Surrealism.

Kind of dry, but good

He is truly one of my heroes. An aviation pioneer as well as a skilled wordsmith, he blazed difficult trails in early aviation and wrote about them as well. His "Le Petit Prince" is an unparalleled classic and still brings me to tears.

My Recommendation: To be completely honest, unless you REALLY love Saint-Exupéry or are obsessed with early aviation/world war history you could pass on this one. Schiff is an incredible writer and really brings everyone to life on the page, but it was not an easy read and there were definitely years it felt like Schiff could've skipped over and I would've been perfectly happy. I'm glad I read it and finally crossed it off my TBR pile, but it was a definite slog.

My Response: This one has been in my TBR pile for over a decade. Seriously, it's been there since 2010 when I heard Schiff speak at the first Boston Book Festival. The one I really wanted to purchase at the time was her biography of Cleopatra, but couldn't afford it.

I ended up waiting to read it until I could get a digital copy (don't want to mess up that signature) and the last dozen or so times the library had one I either didn't have the time or was feeling meh about reading a biography. This time however, after building up so many advance posts I figured I had the time and wanted to read some nonfiction so here we are.

Continue reading on my book blog at geoffwhaley.com.

This is a rather long and comprehensive biography, quite heavy on facts around aviation (I was interested) as well as the cultural scene/life of a French intellectual (I was less interested). Some of it is described matter-of-factly and not particularly engaging.

Not a tonne of room was dedicated to the desert crash, to my surprise, but maybe that's because the man described it himself in one of his books.

New facts about his demise have emerged since the book was written.