People best know French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry for his fairy tale The Little Prince (1943).

He flew for the first time at the age of 12 years in 192 at the Ambérieu airfield and then determined to a pilot. Even after moving to a school in Switzerland and spending summer vacations at the château of the family at Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens in eastern France, he kept that ambition. He writes repeatedly of the house at Saint-Maurice.

Later, in Paris, he failed the entrance exams for the French naval academy and instead enrolled at the prestigious art school l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1921, Saint-Exupéry, stationed in Strasbourg, began serving in the military. He learned and forever settled his career path as a pilot. After leaving the service, in 1923, Saint-Exupéry worked in several professions, but in 1926, he went back to flying and signed as a pilot for Aéropostale, a private airline that flew mail from Toulouse, France, to Dakar, Senegal. In 1927, Saint-Exupéry accepted the position of airfield chief for Cape Juby in southern Morocco and began writing his first book, a memoir, called Southern Mail, published in 1929.

He then moved briefly to Buenos Aires to oversee the establishment of an Argentinean mail service, returned to Paris in 1931, and then published Night Flight, which won instant success and the prestigious Prix Femina. Always daring Saint-Exupéry tried in 1935 to break the speed record for flying from Paris to Saigon. Unfortunately, his plane crashed in the Libyan Desert, and he and his copilot trudged through the sand for three days to find help. In 1938, a second plane crash, this time as he tried to fly between city of New York and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, seriously injured him. The crash resulted in a long convalescence in New York.

Next novel, Wind, Sand and Stars, published in 1939. A great success, the book won the Grand Prix du Roman (grand prize for novel writing) of Académie Française and the National Book Award in the United States. At the beginning of the Second World War, Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance missions for France, but he went to New York to ask the United States for help when the Germans occupied his country. He drew on his wartime experiences to write Flight to Arras and Letter to a Hostage, both published in 1942. His classic The Little Prince appeared in 1943. Later in 1943 Saint-Exupéry rejoined his French air squadron in northern Africa. Despite being forbidden to fly (he was still suffering physically from his earlier plane crashes), Saint-Exupéry insisted on being given a mission. On July 31, 1944, he set out from Borgo, Corsica, to overfly occupied France. He never returned.