Few books have achieved such deep cultural penetration as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved French classic The Little Prince. The illustrated novella about the scarf-clad child who travels the universe searching for wisdom, has been translated into 250 languages, sells nearly 2 million copies each year, and is a frequent choice in advanced French high school classes. And let’s not forget your mom’s hippie friend, who gives you the book as a graduation gift, believing she’s found a less clichéd present than Oh, the Places You’ll Go. “Promise me, honey, you’ll never lose your sense of wonder!”

However delightful, moving, cloying, or tear-inducing you find the novella to be, both the book and its author have a fascinating backstory. This tale is the focus of a new exhibit at the Morgan Library, which runs through April 27th.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in Alghero, Sardinia, May 1944 Photo by John Phillips (1914–1996) | Collection of Andrea Cairone, New York © John and Annamaria Phillips Foundation

Written in New York City by a Frenchman who did not speak a word of English, Le Petit Prince was published in America three years before it appeared in France. Saint-Exupéry himself did not live to see the book hit shelves in his native land; he disappeared in 1944, while flying a reconnaissance mission against Germany. Over 50 years later, his ID bracelet washed up in a fisherman’s net off the coast of Marseille.

“Of course it’s a French story,” says Christine Nelson, curator of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan. “But it was born in New York when author was an ex-patriot and distraught about what was going on in his country and in the world.”

Despite his friendship with fellow aviator Charles Lindbergh, Saint-Exupéry was staunchly anti-Nazi–so much so, that he could not bear to live in Paris under the Reich-affiliated Pétain government. Much of the books thematic content, including its anti-egotism, anti-materialism, and exploration of shame and isolation, are responses to the author’s own self-imposed exile.





In the end, he could not stay away from his country or the war. He put the finished manuscript in a brown paper sack and dropped it at a friend’s house with instructions to publish. Then he rejoined former his air force unit back in France.

According to Nelson, the book was inspired by an earlier plane crash, when Saint-Exupéry went down in the Libyan desert in the mid ’30s. She says “the most striking image” in the exhibit is a drawing that depicts the book’s narrator asleep beside his plane, just before the Prince arrives.