Though it is now his most famous and beloved work, when it was first published on April 6, 1943, The Little Prince seemed like something of a deviation for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The French pilot and writer was already a literary star; he had won the National Book Award four years earlier for Wind, Sand and Stars, his lyrical memoir centering on his 1935 plane crash into the Sahara Desert, and his next book, 1942’s Flight to Arras, immediately became the fastest-selling title in the history of his publishing house.
But he was now marooned in America, and he struggled with his health and his loneliness; at the suggestion of a friend, he began to write a children’s story about the little boy he so often doodled, “as a kind of therapy,” writes Stacey Schiff. The story came quickly, and he painted the illustrations himself with a children’s watercolor set that he bought at a nearby drugstore.
“Reynal and Hitchcock knew that a winsome fairy tale was not exactly what readers expected from the virile author of Flight to Arras,” Schiff explains.
In their promotion they took the coy way out: “Reviewers and critics will have a field day explaining to you just what kind of story it is,” they announced. “As far as we are concerned it is the new book by Saint-Exupéry.” Few read The Little Prince as a tale for children and not everyone recommended it for adults. Overall critics were more bemused than impressed.
“The startling thing, looking again at the first reviews of the book, is that, far from being welcomed as a necessary and beautiful parable, it bewildered and puzzled its readers,” Adam Gopnik wrote in 2014. “Among the early reviewers, only P.L. Travers—who had, with a symmetry that makes the nonbeliever shiver, written an equivalent myth for England in her Mary Poppins books—really grasped the book’s dimensions, or its importance.”
Sales were lackluster, but Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was spared the disappointment—he returned to the front just before the book was published, and in 1944, disappeared on his way back from a reconnaissance mission, his plane plummeting into the sea.
But The Little Prince endured. Now it sells 2 million copies a year and is the world’s most translated non-religious book. (“You can read The Little Prince today in 270 languages, including ones that have no word for ‘prince’ and no concept of boredom; it is printed in 26 different alphabets,” Schiff notes.) It is widely beloved by many readers, young and old, finally recognized as the genre-defying masterpiece it always was.
