Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, vicomte de Saint-Exupéry, known simply as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French writer, poet, journalist and aviator.

Born in Lyon to an aristocratic family, Saint-Exupéry trained as a commercial pilot in the early 1920s, working airmail routes across Europe, Africa, and South America. Between 1926 and 1939, four of his literary works were published: the short story The Aviator, novels Southern Mail and Night Flight, and the memoir Wind, Sand and Stars. Saint-Exupéry joined the French Air Force for World War II and flew reconnaissance missions until France’s armistice with Germany in 1940. After being demobilised by the Air Force, Saint-Exupéry lived in exile in the United States between 1941 and 1943 and helped persuade it to enter the war. During this time, his works Flight to Arras and The Little Prince were published.

Saint-Exupéry returned to combat by joining the Free French Air Force in 1943, despite being past the maximum age for a war pilot and in declining health. On 31 July 1944, during a reconnaissance mission over Corsica, Saint-Exupéry’s plane disappeared: it is presumed to have crashed. Debris from the wreckage was discovered near Marseille in 2000, but the cause of the crash remains unknown.

Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon, into the French aristocratic Catholic family that traced its lineage back several centuries. Their surname references the 5th-century bishop Saint Exuperius. He was the third child of Viscount Jean de Saint-Exupéry (1863–1904) and his wife, Marie Boyer de Fonscolombe (1875–1972).His father, an executive of the Le Soleil (The Sun) insurance brokerage, died of a stroke in the train station of La Foux before Saint-Exupéry’s 4th birthday. His father’s death affected the entire family, transforming their status to that of “impoverished aristocrats”.

Saint-Exupéry had three sisters and a younger brother, François, who died at age 15 of rheumatic fever contracted while both were attending the Marianist College Villa St. Jean in Fribourg, Switzerland, during World War I. Saint-Exupéry attended to his brother, who he claimed was his closest confidant, beside his death bed, and later wrote that François “remained motionless for an instant. He did not cry out. He fell as gently as a tree falls”, imagery later recrafted into the climactic ending of The Little Prince. At the age of 17, now the only male in the family following the death of his brother, Saint-Exupéry soon assumed the role of a protector and took to consoling his family, despite still being distraught over his father’s death.

After twice failing his final exams at a preparatory Naval Academy, Saint-Exupéry entered the École des Beaux-Arts as an auditor to study architecture for 15 months, again without graduating, and then fell into the habit of accepting odd jobs. In 1921, Saint-Exupéry began his military service as a basic-rank soldier with the 2e Régiment de chasseurs à cheval (2nd Mounted Hunters Regiment) and was sent to Neuhof, near Strasbourg. While there, he took private flying lessons and the following year was offered a transfer from the French Army to the French Air Force. He received his pilot’s wings after being posted to the 37th Fighter Regiment in Casablanca, Morocco.

Later, Saint-Exupéry was reposted to the 34th Aviation Regiment at Le Bourget on the outskirts of Paris, and then experienced the first of his many aircraft crashes. Saint-Exupéry, influenced by the urgings of the family of his fiancée, future novelist Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin, subsequently left the air force to take an office job. The couple ultimately broke off their engagement and he worked at several more odd jobs over the next few years.

By 1926, Saint-Exupéry was flying again. He became one of the pioneers of international postal flight, in the days when aircraft had few instruments. Later, he complained that those who flew the more advanced aircraft had become more like accountants than pilots. He worked for Aéropostale between Toulouse and Dakar, and then also became the airline stopover manager for the Cape Juby airfield in the Spanish zone of South Morocco, in the Sahara. His duties included negotiating the safe release of downed fliers taken hostage by Saharan tribes, a perilous task that earned him his first Légion d’honneur from the French Government in 1930.

In 1929, Saint-Exupéry was transferred to Argentina, where he was appointed director of the Aeroposta Argentina airline. He lived in Buenos Aires, in the Galería Güemes building. He surveyed new air routes across South America, negotiated agreements, and occasionally flew the airmail as well as search missions looking for downed fliers. This period of his life is briefly explored in Wings of Courage, an IMAX film by French director Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Saint-Exupéry’s first novella, L’Aviateur (The Aviator), was published in 1926 in a short-lived literary magazine, Le Navire d’Argent (The Silver Ship). In 1929, his first book, Courrier Sud (Southern Mail) was published. It chronicled his time flying the Casablanca-Dakar mail route.

The 1931 publication of Night Flight established Saint-Exupéry as a rising star in the literary world. It was the first of his major works to gain widespread acclaim, and it won the prix Femina. The novel mirrored his experiences as a mail pilot and director of the Aeroposta Argentina.

That same year, at Grasse, Saint-Exupéry married Consuelo Suncin (née Suncín Sandoval), a once-divorced, once-widowed Salvadoran writer and artist, who Saint-Exupéry described as having possessed a bohemian spirit and a “viper’s tongue”.

Saint-Exupéry left and returned to his wife many times—he saw her as both his muse, but, over the long term, the source of much of his angst. The relationship has been described as ‘rocky’, with Saint-Exupéry travelling frequently and indulging in numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé (1908–2003), known as “Nelly” and referred to as “Madame de B.” in Saint-Exupéry biographies. Vogüé became Saint-Exupéry’s literary executrix after his death and also wrote her own Saint-Exupéry biography under a pseudonym, Pierre Chevrier.

Saint-Exupéry continued to write until the spring of 1943 when he left the United States with American troops bound for North Africa in the Second World War.

Book	Author	Original language	First published	Approximate sales	Genre
The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince)	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	French	1943	200 million	Fantasy

He is second best selling author all time.