Contributor

Black and white photograph of French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

(1900 - 1944)

Having published two novels about aviation, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and a friend attempted to break the speed record flying from Paris to Saigon in 1935 and crash-landed in the Libyan desert, trekking through it for three days until a Bedouin caravan discovered them. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye,” he wrote in his most famous work, The Little Prince. Saint-Exupéry disappeared while flying from Corsica to France on a reconnaissance mission in 1944.

All Writing

There is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939

Miscellany

Having come to the U.S. through Portugal, French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote and illustrated part of The Little Prince—one of the best-selling works of fiction of all time—in a twenty-two room mansion on Long Island in 1942. “I wanted a hut,” he reflected, “and it’s the Palace of Versailles.”

Miscellany

Among those who stayed at the Florida Hotel while reporting on the Spanish Civil War were John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Herbst, Robert Capa, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn noted a day when an “influx of shits” came for lunch, one of whom was “a nice handsome dumb named Errol Flynn who looks like white fire on screen but is only very, very average off.”

Issues Contributed

Cover of Technology, the Winter 2021 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly

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Discovery

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Youth

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