Le Petit prince

First edition illustrated with drawings by the author, bearing a "second printing" statement issued a few months after the first impression. Paperback and hardback copies were published simultaneously.

Publisher's blue cloth binding, flat spine, complete with its illustrated dust jacket featuring the $2.00 price, a few skilful restorations to the dust jacket.

A fine and rare copy of the first French edition published in New York by the publishers of Mary Poppins, Reynal & Hitchcock, who issued The Little Prince simultaneously in French and in English.

« Les contes de fées c'est comme ça. Un matin on se réveille. On dit : "ce n'était qu'un conte de fées..." On sourit de soi. Mais au fond on ne sourit guère. On sait bien que les contes de fées c'est la seule vérité de la vie. » (Saint-Exupéry, Lettre à l'inconnue, mai 1943)

A universal fairytale if ever there was one (the Little Prince is, after the Bible, the most-translated book in the world), this hymn to travel, friendship and childhood was considered a masterpiece right from the start. It took – in the guise of a children's story – a profound look at the tragic present, revealing a more complex philosophy on the author's part than that for which his critics gave him credit at the time.

Though we don't know precisely the genesis of the character – Annabella, the actress', reading of Andersen, the gift of a box of watercolors by René Clair, an idea from his publisher Elisabeth Reynal, or simply the memory of his late brother – the actual writing of this tale was heavily marked by the war, by exile, and by Saint-Exupéry's difficult relationship with the authorities of the French Resistance.

Demobbed in 1940, the writer celebrated for Terre des Hommes [Wind, Sand and Stars] in 1939, sought refuge in New York where he wrote and published (in February 1942) Pilote de Guerre [Flight to Arras] in an effort to convince American public opinion of the courage of French soldiers despite their inevitable defeat. Too philo-Semitic for some and too defeatist for others, this story, quickly banned in France, earned him the ire of both the Petainists and the Gaullists, who forced him into inaction despite the fact that North Africa had been retaken by the Allies, opening the way for renewed armed combat.
Despite an intense social and emotional life, it was with a feeling of profound solitude and being misunderstood that Saint-Exupéry wrote, in 1942, the Little Prince for his publisher Eugene Reynal & Curtice Hitchcock in New York, who had just published Mary Poppins.

At the end of 1942, Saint-Exupéry added fuel to the fire by broadcasting on the radio and then publishing his Lettre aux Français [Letter to the French People] which called on Frenchmen abroad and the French in France to unite against Nazism. His call for a reconciliation and a united front without exceptions against the common enemy, his refusal to judge the choices made by a people oppressed and his implied criticism of the power struggles between the combatant parties earned him the inimitable dislike of the followers of De Gaulle, who were at the time competing for power with those of General Giraud.

Accused of being overly tolerant, this radio message drew some very sharp criticism, including from a writer dear to Saint-Exupéry, the philosopher and theologian Jacques Maritain. These violent attacks on the writer obscured, for his contemporaries, the profound intimacy shared by this call to arms for adults and the tale for children which appeared a few months later.

The forced exile from his country “lost somewhere in the night, all its lights extinguished, like a ship,” the France that “must be saved...both in the spirit and in the flesh,” the absurdity of people who drew apart even to the point of fighting among themselves and the two questions “what is a spiritual inheritance worth when there are no more heirs?” and “What good is an heir if the Spirit is dead?” of his Lettre aux Français are all themes developed in what would be the last and most important of all his books, the Little Prince; that “little book [written] only for friends, those who understand it”.The latter did not fail to read the tale in light of the manifesto and would have recognized in the wisdom of the Fox warning the Little Prince, “language is a source of misunderstanding,” the almost perfect echo of the fighter addressing his fellow-countrymen: “language is an imperfect instrument.”

Inspired by a childlike character that Saint-Exupéry doodled in the margins of his letters and notebooks and which was originally a self-portrait, the Little Prince is just as much poetic fable as philosophical testimony. In that sense, the death of the child hero of the tale, which Saint-Exupéry refused to cut to the great chagrin of his publishers, would not have been alien to his stubborn nature, which sent him hurtling to his heroic and absurd death.