The Little Prince

A pilot, stranded in the Sahara after his plane engine fails, meets a small, solemn boy who asks him to draw a sheep and slowly reveals that he has traveled from a tiny asteroid called B612, where he tends a single vain, demanding rose he loves without quite knowing how to say so. Before reaching Earth, the prince visited six neighboring asteroids, each home to exactly one adult, a king with no subjects to rule, a vain man who wants only applause, a drunkard ashamed of his own drinking, a businessman endlessly counting stars he claims to own, a lamplighter obeying an absurd schedule, and a geographer who has never left his desk to see the world he maps, each one a small, precise portrait of an adult failing to see what matters. On Earth the prince meets a fox who asks to be tamed and then explains, in the book's most quoted line, that one sees clearly only with the heart, since what is essential is invisible to the eye, a lesson the prince carries back to his memory of his rose. After a year on Earth, dying of thirst alongside the pilot in the desert, the two find a well, and soon after the prince arranges to be bitten by a yellow snake, telling the pilot his body is only an old shell too heavy to carry him home. He falls silently to the sand, and by morning his body is gone. The novel ends with the pilot, years later, still scanning the night sky and asking any reader who ever meets a small golden haired boy with unanswered questions to write and tell him at once.

Saint-Exupéry illustrated the book himself in watercolor, and the plain, almost childlike drawings carry as much of the story's feeling as the prose does. It reads quickly, in short chapters simple enough for a child to follow, while carrying an unmistakable adult sorrow underneath, about loneliness, about loving something and being responsible for it, that keeps drawing readers back to it well into adulthood.

Saint-Exupéry wrote the book in 1942 while living in exile in New York after France's defeat, working largely at a rented house called Bevin House on Long Island during a difficult period marked by ill health and a strained marriage to his wife Consuelo, generally taken as the model for the prince's demanding rose. He dedicated the book to his closest friend Leon Werth, and weeks after its publication he rejoined the Free French air force; he disappeared over the Mediterranean on a reconnaissance flight in July 1944 and was never found.