Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Before he wrote anything that lasted, Saint-Exupéry flew the mail. He joined the Latécoère line in the 1920s, carried sacks between Toulouse, Spain and Dakar, ran the lonely airfield at Cape Juby on the edge of the Sahara, and later opened the Patagonia run for Aeroposta Argentina. Courrier Sud in 1929 and Vol de nuit in 1931, which took the Prix Femina, grew directly out of that flying, as did Terre des hommes in 1939, published in English as Wind, Sand and Stars. In 1935 he and his navigator André Prévot came down in the Libyan desert on a Paris to Saigon record attempt and went days without water before a Bedouin found them. That thirst, and the visions that came with it, sit underneath The Little Prince, which he wrote and painted himself while living in the United States. Reynal and Hitchcock published it in New York during 1943, in French and in Katherine Woods's English translation; France did not see it until 1945. Born at Lyon in 1900, he talked his way back into a reconnaissance squadron despite being over the age limit, took off from Corsica on 31 July 1944 and never returned. He was forty-four.