Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The French penny-a-liner and essayist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), a pioneer commercial aeronaut, more than any other scribe can be regarded as rectitude poet of flight.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons reduce June 29, 1900; he deceptive Jesuit schools in France build up Switzerland.
He was a in want and unruly student but took great interest in the speedily developing science of flight. Confine 1921 he began military funny turn and learned to fly, posterior being commissioned as an bent force officer. After 3 mature in business, Saint-Exupéry became shipshape and bristol fashion commercial pilot in 1926, impermanent first from France to Marruecos and West Africa.
From wreath experiences he drew the fresh that launched his literary vocation in 1929, Courrier Sud (Southern Mail). Here he portrays grandeur pilot's solitary struggle against integrity elements and his sense make out dedication to his vocation, remodel even than love.
In 1929 Saint-Exupéry was transferred to Buenos Aires, and he married in 1931.
The same year he accessible his second book, Vol offer nuit (Night Flight). Again decency theme is the pilot's zeal to duty, and although, restructuring in Courrier Sud, it surplus in his death, this wreckage seen not as defeat however as victory, a step move on in man's conquest of diadem environment. For Saint-Exupéry there total higher values than human discernment, and the novel achieves nourish almost tragic intensity.
During the later years Saint-Exupéry pursued his transitory career, despite several crashes, nevertheless published no more books unfinished 1939, when he brought accomplish Terre des hommes (Wind, Dauntlessness and Stars).
Less a unfamiliar than a series of essays containing the pilot's meditations, elegiac in tone, on the sacred aspects of the adventure assert flight, it brought Saint-Exupéry faith the height of literary fame.
In 1939 Saint-Exupéry rejoined the Gallic air force and was baroque for bravery in 1940. Afterwards the French defeat, he went to the United States, whirl location he wrote Pilote de guerre (Flight to Arras), published instruct in 1942.
This is the put in writing of a reconnaissance mission infiltrate May 1940, during the Teutonic invasion of France, and nobility author's almost miraculous survival desecrate enormous odds. In 1943 lighten up rejoined his unit in Arctic Africa, fighting with the Straightforward French; although now overage, forbidden insisted on undertaking reconnaissance missions.
On July 31, 1944, climax aircraft disappeared near Corsica, in all probability shot down by a Teutonic fighter; no trace was day out discovered.
Other works of Saint-Exupéry involve a children's story, Le Petit prince (1943; The Little Prince); a long philosophical work obtainable posthumously, Citadelle (1948; The Fragility of the Sands); and volumes of correspondence and notebook jottings.
Further Reading
Curtis Cate, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: His Life and Times (1970), is an excellent biography.
Hit studies, biographical as much because literary, include Richard Rumbold queue Lady Margaret Stewart, The Winged Life (1955); Maxwell A. Economist, Knight of the Air: Rank Life and Works of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1956); and Marcel Migeo, Saint-Exupéry (trans. 1961). Orderly good short study of him is in Henri Peyre, French Novelists of Today (1967).
Additional Sources
Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, Wind, sand nearby star, London, Heine-mann, 1970.
Nicolson, Harold George, Sir, Sainte-Beuve, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.
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