Viscount Antoine de Saint-Exupery was a very versatile person. In addition to The Little Prince, other works that are no less significant or fascinating have come out from under his pen, although he is familiar to most readers because of this book. And who knows, if he had not died during the Second World War, maybe he would have written something just as beautiful?
The writer had four brothers and sisters. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry came from an ancient noble family, however, impoverished. Noble title writer – Viscount. In France, it is in the middle between the baron and the count. At the age of 12, he flew on an airplane for the first time. As a passenger, of course. This delighted him so much that his love for him remained with him forever. As a child, Exupery tried to assemble an airplane from an old bicycle, sheets and wire. The first work, he published, was called “Pilot”.
Exupery’s dream was to fly a plane from Paris to Vietnam. Having saved enough money, he bought a plane and decided to make the dream a reality. Halfway through the plane crashed, the writer miraculously survived. He was already dying of thirst in the desert when local Bedouin nomads stumbled upon him and saved his life. Contemporaries noticed that Exupery did not know how to lie – he immediately began to blush and hesitate. The famous saying “We are responsible for those who have tamed” – a quote from his book “The Little Prince”. Total Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote seven great works and a half dozen small ones. His last major novel, The Citadel, was published after his death. The Little Prince has been translated into more than 180 languages, including Braille (the language of the blind).
Exupery repeatedly fell into protracted depressions, despite the fact that in public he usually looked an extremely benevolent and cheerful person. The writer was left-handed. In total, in peacetime and wartime, Exupery crashed at the controls of the aircraft 15 times. He significantly improved several aviation instruments of his time, even having received a patent for these improvements. With the beginning of the Second World War, Exupery enlisted as a volunteer in the French air force. As part of the squadron, he made many combat and reconnaissance missions. The writer and pilot died in the summer of 1944. The wreckage of his aircraft was found on the seabed only in 2000. The cause of his death is unclear, and most historians agree that Exupery died because of a plane crash. However, in 2008, a veteran of the German Air Force announced that he had shot Exupery down, not knowing who was at the helm. The German also added that he would not shoot, knowing whom he was shooting at, since he was a big fan of the work of the French writer.
