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1900 - 1944
It is as a writer that "St-Ex" gained celebrity before the second world war. His books "Courrier Sud" of 1929, "Vol de Nuit" (of 1931), "Terre des Hommes" (in 1939), "Pilote de Guerre" (in 1942) and "le Petit Prince" are now great literature classics.
Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger de Saint Exupéry was born in Lyon to an old family of provincial nobility, the third of five children of Marie de Fonscolombe and Viscount Jean de Saint-Exupéry, an insurance broker who died before his son was even four.
After failing his final exams at preparatory school, Saint Exupéry entered the école des Beaux-Arts to study architecture. In 1921, he began his military service with the 2nd Regiment of Chasseurs (light cavalry), and was then sent to Strasbourg for training as a pilot. The following year, he obtained his license and was offered transfer to the air force. Bowing to the objections of the family of his fiancée-the future novelist Louise Leveque de Vilmorin-he instead settled in Paris and took an office job. The couple ultimately broke off the engagement, however, and he worked at several jobs over the next few years without success.
After his military service in the French aviation, de Saint-Exupery was hired by the Latecoère company. He built his mail pilot experience between France and Africa, and later in South America, on the dangerous air routes across the "Cordiere of Andes", between Brazil and Argentina. Back in France, he worked as a advertising agent for Air France in the late thirties.
Saint Exupéry continued to write and fly until the beginning of World War II. During the war, he initially flew with the GR II/33 reconnaissance squadron of the Armée de l'Air. After France's 1940 armistice with Germany, he traveled to the United States. The Saint Exupérys lived in a penthouse apartment at 240 Central Park South in New York City and a rented mansion in Asharoken on Long Island's north shore between January 1941 and April 1943, and also in Quebec City for a time in 1942. He wrote "The Little Prince" in Asharoken in the summer and fall of 1942; the manuscript was completed by October.
Following his nearly twenty-five months in North America, Saint Exupéry returned to Europe to fly with the Free French Forces and fight with the Allies in a Mediterranean-based squadron. Then 43, he was older than most men assigned such duties; he also suffered pain, due to his many fractures. He was assigned with a number of other pilots to fly a F-5B-1-LO, the reconnaissance version of the P-38 Lightning.
Saint Exupéry's final assignment was to collect intelligence on German troop movements in and around the Rhone Valley preceding the Allied invasion of southern France. On the evening of July 31, 1944, he left from an airbase on Corsica, and was never seen again.
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