Saint‐Ex had foreseen from the beginning that the French could be liberated only if the weight of Amer ican power was placed in the scales. It was unthinkable that America should not enter the war. With that?? conviction to support him, he arrived in New York on the last day of 1940.

He could not have imagined that his self‐exile would last 27 months. Fortunately, he had this in common with Voltaire, that the deeper his mind was troubled, the more he found relief in writing. In 1941 he wrote “Pilote de Guerre” (“Flight to Arras”), his sober, exalting war book, the only b??k in which he displayed a mastery of the art of com position, staying power as a writer. He wrote also his peren ??ally popular fable, “The Little Prince.” His last publication in New York was called “Letter to a Hostage,” a moving mes sage to Leon Werth, his closest Jewish friend, a novelist and Trotskyite who had put down a comrade with the words: “When for once he says something that makes sense, it's no time to be criticizing the Pope.”

Mr. Cate relates some of the schemes Saint‐Ex devised for the help of Britain in her lone stand, and‐his views in relation to the North African landings. He was consulted by Gen. Carl Spaatz of the U.S. Air Force about airfields and related matters in that part of the world he knew so intimately. Finally, in April, 1943, it was from an American troop ship that this foreigner and civilian landed at Algiers, avid to rejoin Group 2/33 with which he had flown in 1939‐40.

General Giraud, commanding the French forces in Africa, raised Captain de Saint‐Exupery to the rank of major and ob tained the Americans’ acquies cence in his return to 2/33, now a unit in an American photo ‐ reconnaissance group. On his second mission over France, Saint‐Ex cracked up a P‐38 and was grounded by the Americans as “over age.” He spent the most distressed year of his life in Gaullist Algiers until in April, 1944, two American friends arranged for his return to 2/33. It was from their base in Corsica that at 44 he took off never to return.

Had he survived the war, what would have become of him? “France,” he had written in Algiers, “needs a common denominator.” That had been true since 1789. De Gaulle had not been able to provide it by the time of his first retirement from office in January, 1946. Long before his return to the Presidency of the Republic (the Fifth) in 1958, Saint‐Ex would perhaps have taken the step he hinted at in an unmailed letter found after his death: “If I had the faith [he was a lapsed Catholic] it is certain that once this ‘necessary and thankless job’ is over, I could no longer bear anything but Solesmes.” (Solesmes is an ancient and still flourishing abbey of the Benedictine Order.) For he had also written: “There is but one problem, only one: to redis cover that the life of the spirit is higher than the life of the mind.”

A “serious” man was for him the farmer at one with the earth, the cabinetmaker caress ing a length of rosewood, the mechanic with a sense of re sponsibility to his job who, when they flew together, was a kind of comrade‐in‐arms. Saint‐Ex had no use for the revolutionary revolting for vengeance's sake. No writer of his time lent more dignity to the human being. There are no “villains” in his books. He saw none in life except those men who lived for themselves and not for something higher than themselves—a craft, a creed, a philosophy of life however erroneous it might appear to him. To ideologists he said, “The end justifies the means. Yes, but only when the means do not contradict the end.” William Blake, that pro digiously realistic mystic, could not have said it better.

Mr. Cate paints the man “warts and all.” His vast docu mentation is organized with professional skill, but in his aim to write the definitive “life,” and animated by a sense of obligation to all who con tributed to his research, he has included repetitive matter — private letters and notes of countless interviews — which clogs the narrative and adds nothing to his delineation of Saint‐Ex's character and ac count of his life.