Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Born Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger de Saint-Exupéry on June 29, 1900, in Lyon, into an aristocratic Catholic family that traced its lineage to a fifth-century bishop, he was the third of five children and lost his father, an insurance executive, to a stroke before his fourth birthday. The death turned the family into what he later called impoverished aristocrats. He failed twice at the Naval Academy entrance exams, took private flying lessons during military service, and earned his pilot's wings in Casablanca in 1922. From 1926 he flew the airmail routes of the Aéropostale across the Pyrenees, the Sahara, and the Andes, surviving multiple crashes and a long thirst in the Libyan desert in 1935 that became the central episode of Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), his memoir of flying and loss. Night Flight (1931) had already won the Prix Femina. After France fell in 1940 he lived in exile in New York, where he wrote The Little Prince (1943), the story of a small voyager from an asteroid who befriends a fox and tames a rose. The book has been translated into more than three hundred languages. He rejoined the Free French Air Force in 1943, forty-three years old, well past the maximum age for a war pilot and in poor health, his body broken by old crashes. On July 31, 1944, he took off from Corsica on a reconnaissance mission over occupied France and never returned. His silver identity bracelet was found in the sea off Marseille in 1998; pieces of his Lockheed Lightning were recovered in 2000, the cause of the crash still unknown.

In June 1930, when his friend and fellow Aéropostale pilot Henri Guillaumet vanished flying the Andes, Saint-Exupéry spent five days searching the mountains by air and found nothing. Guillaumet walked out alive after a week in the snow and told him, 'What I have done, I swear to you, no animal would have done.'