3825. Little Prince

The Little Prince (French: ''Le Petit Prince''), first published in 1943, is a novella and the most famous work of the French aristocrat writer, poet and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944, Mort pour la France).
The novella is the most read and also the most translated book in the French language, and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France allowing it to maintain worldwide sales of over one million copies per year. It has been translated into more than 250 languages and dialects, and has sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books ever published.
Saint-Exupéry, a laureate of France's highest literary awards and a reserve military pilot at the start of the Second World War, both wrote and illustrated the manuscript while exiled in the United States after the fall of France. He had traveled there on a personal mission to convince its government to quickly enter the war against Nazi Germany. In the midst of personal upheavals and failing health he produced almost half of the writings he would be remembered for, including a tender tale of loneliness, friendship, love and loss, in the form of a young prince fallen to Earth.
An earlier memoir by the author recounted his aviation experiences in the Sahara desert. He is thought to have drawn on those same experiences for use as plot elements in The Little Prince. Saint-Exupéry's novella has been adapted to various media over the decades, including audio recordings, stage, screen, ballet and operatic works.

All of the novella's simple but elegant watercolour illustrations were painted by Saint-Exupéry, who had studied architecture as a young adult but who nevertheless could not be considered an artist—which he self-mockingly referred to in the novella's introduction. Several of his paintings were committed on the wrong side of the delicate onion skin paper that he used, his medium of choice. As with some of his draft manuscripts, he occasionally gave away preliminary sketches to close friends and colleagues; others were even recovered as crumpled balls from the floors in the cockpits of the P-38 Lightnings he later flew. Two or three original Little Prince drawings were reported in 1967 in the collections of New York artist, sculptor and experimental filmmaker Joseph Cornell. One rare original Little Prince watercolour would be mysteriously sold at a second-hand book fair in Japan in 1994, and subsequently authenticated in 2007.
An unrepentant life-long doodler, Saint-Exupéry had for numerous years sketched little people on his napkins, tablecloths, letters to paramours and friends, lined notebooks and other scraps of paper. Early little princes took on a multitude of appearances, engaged in a variety of tasks. Some appeared as doll-like figures, baby puffins, angel's with wings, and even a similar Keep On Truckin' figure later to be made famous by Robert Crumb. Figures were frequently seen chasing butterflies; when asked why they did so, Saint-Exupéry, who thought of the figures as his alter-ego, replied that they were actually pursuing a "realistic ideal". Saint-Exupéry eventually settled on the image of the young, precocious child with curly blond hair, an image which in the future would become the subject of many speculations as to its source.
In 2001 Japanese researcher Yoshitsugu Kunugiyama speculated that the cover illustration Saint-Exupéry painted for Le Petit Prince deliberately depicted a stellar arrangement chosen to celebrate the author's own centennial of birth. According to Kunugiyama, the cover art Saint-Exupéry drew contained the planets Saturn and Jupiter, plus the star Aldebaran, arranged as an isosceles triangle, a celestial configuration which occurred in the early 1940s, and which he likely knew would next reoccur in 2000. Saint-Exupéry possessed superior mathematical skills and was a master celestial navigator, a vocation he had studied in the French Air Force.