The turning point in Saint-Exupery’s life came in 1921 when he started his military service in the 2ND Regiment of Chasseurs, and was sent to Strasbourg for training as a pilot. He had flown, with a pilot, for the first time in 1912. On July 9, 1921, he made his first flight alone in a Sopwith F-CTEE. Next year Saint-Exupery obtained his pilot’s licence, and was offered a transfer to the air force. However, when his fiancee’s family objected, he settled in Paris where he took an office job and started to write.
During these years Saint-Exupery wrote his first novel, Southern Mail (1929), which celebrated the courage of the early pilots, flying at the limits of safety, to speed on the mail and win a commercial advantage over rail and steamship rivals. Another story line in the work depicted the author’s failed love affair with the novelist Louise de Vilmorin. In 1929 Saint-Exupery moved to South America, where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina Company.
Saint-Exupery married in 1931 Consuelo Gomez Carillo, a widow, whose other literary friends included Maurice Maeterlinck and Gabriele D’Annunzio. “He wasn’t like other people,” she wrote later in Memoires de la rose, “but like a child or an angel who has fallen down from the sky. ” The marriage was stormy. Consuelo was jealous for good reasons and felt neglected, when her husband did not spend much time at home. He also had affairs with other women.
The Term Paper on Antoine De Saint Exupery
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He wrote for Paris-Soir and covered the May Day events in Moscow in 1936, and wrote a series of articles on the Spanish Civil War. Saint-Exupery lived a traveling, adventurous life: he persuaded Air-France to let him fly a Caudron Simoun (F-ANRY), and had an aviation accident in 1935 in North Africa. He walked in the desert for days before being saved by a caravan. In 1937, he bought another Caudron Simoun, and was severely injured in Guatemala in a plane crash. Encouraged by his friend Andre Gide,
Saint-Exupery wrote during his convalescence a book about the pilot’s profession. Wind, Sand and Stars, which appeared in 1939. After the fall of France in World War II Saint-Exupery joined the army, and made several daring flights, although he was considered unable to fly military planes because of his several injures. However, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. After a bad landing his commanding officer decided that he was too old to go on flying, but after a pause he was allowed to rejoin his unit.
In 1943 Saint-Exupery published his best-known work, The Little Prince (1943), a children’s fable for adults, which has been translated into over 150 languages. It has been claimend that The Little Prince is the best-selling book after the Bible and Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Saint-Exupery devoted to book to his friend Leon Werth. Its narrator is a pilot who has crash-landed in a desert. He meets a boy, who turns out to be a prince from another planet. The prince tells about his adventures on Earth and about his precious rose from his planet.
He is disappointed when he discovers that roses are common on Earth. A desert fox convinces him that the prince should love his own rare rose and finding thus meaning to his life, the prince returns back home. The rare rose is usually interpreted as Consuelo. On July 31, 1944 Saint-Exupery took off from an airstrip in Sardinia on a flight over southern France. His plane disappeared – he was shot down over the Mediterranean, or perhaps there was an accident, or it was suicide. Eventually Saint-Exupery plane, Lockheed Lightning P-38, was found in May 2000.
