Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Net Worth

Background and career

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, vicomte de Saint-Exupéry (29 June 1900 – c. 31 July 1944), known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (UK: , US: ; French: [ɑ̃twan də sɛ̃t‿ɛɡzypeʁi] ), was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator. He is best known as the author of The Little Prince.

Born in Lyon to an aristocratic family, Saint-Exupéry learned to fly during his military service in 1921. In 1926 he joined the airline Latécoère, later Aéropostale, flying mail between Toulouse and Dakar and serving as station manager at Cape Juby in the Sahara. In 1929 he moved to Argentina to run the company's South American subsidiary, Aeroposta Argentina. His experiences as a pilot shaped his early fiction: the short story The Aviator (1926) and the novels Southern Mail (1929) and Night Flight (1931), which won the Prix Femina. During the 1930s he also worked as a reporter, covering the Soviet Union in 1935 and the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and 1937, and survived a crash in the Libyan Desert during an attempted record flight from Paris to Saigon in 1935. His memoir Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) received the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française and, in its English edition, the U.S. National Book Award.

Saint-Exupéry joined the French Air Force at the outbreak of World War II and flew reconnaissance missions until France's armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised, he went into exile in the United States, where he lived from 1941 to 1943 and argued publicly for US intervention in the war. During this period he published Flight to Arras (1942) and The Little Prince (1943), a novella he wrote and illustrated himself. Published in France by Gallimard in 1946, The Little Prince became one of the most translated and best-selling books in the world.

In 1943, despite being past the maximum age for a war pilot and in declining health, Saint-Exupéry rejoined his former reconnaissance group in North Africa, flying with the Allied forces. On 31 July 1944 he took off from Corsica, France on a reconnaissance mission over southern France and never returned; his plane is presumed to have crashed. He was officially declared Mort pour la France (lit. 'died for France'). Wreckage of his Lockheed P-38 Lightning was found off the coast of Marseille in 2000 and formally identified in 2003, but the cause of the crash remains unknown.