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Summary
Summary
The Little Prince is a work in French language, the most famous by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Published in 1943 in New York simultaneously in English and French, it's a poetic and philosophical tale in the guise of a children's story. It has simple and uncluttered language, because it is intended to be understood by children, and, in fact, for the narrator, it is the preferred vehicle of a symbolic conception of life. Each chapter talks about a meeting of the little prince who leaves him perplexed about the absurd behavior of grown-ups. Each of these meetings can be read as an allegory. The watercolor paintings are part of the text and participate in this purity of language: simplicity and deepness are the key qualities of the work. You can read an invitation from the author to find the child in yourself, because all grown-ups were first children (but few of them remember) . The book is dedicated to Léon Werth, but when he was a little boy .
Author Notes
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 1900 - 1944 Antoine de Saint-Exupery was born in Lyon, France on June 29, 1900. Saint-Exupery was educated in Jesuit schools. He later attended a Catholic boarding school in Switzerland before entering the Ecole de Beaux-Arts as an architecture student.
de Saint-Exupery began his military service in 1921 and was sent to Strasbourgh to be trained as a pilot. He received his pilot's license in 1922 and, after a few dead end jobs as a bookkeeper and an automobile salesman, he began flying mail for a commercial airline company. His route over North Africa was the basis for his first novel, Southern Mail, in 1929.
His second novel, Night Flight, became an international bestseller and was made into a film in 1933. By that time, de Saint-Exupery was married to Consuelo Gomez Castillo and was working as a test pilot for Air France. He was also working as a foreign correspondent covering May Day events in Moscow and writing a series on the Spanish Civil War.
His book, Wind, Sand and Stars won the French Academy's 1939 Grand Prix du Roman and the National Book Award in the United States. He came to the United States after France fell in World War II, but rejoined the French Air Force in North Africa in 1943. That same year he published The Little Prince, a children's story of such universal appeal that it has been translated into close to fifty languages.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery took off on a flight over Southern France on July 31, 1944 and was never seen again. In 1998, a fisherman found a bracelet with his name and his wife's name engraved on it, 150 kilometers west of Marseilles.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 1-4-Actors Richard Gere and Haley Joel Osment read Antoine de Saint-Exupery's book with the assistance of several other actors and actresses. A pilot stranded in the desert awakens one morning to see, standing before him, a most extraordinary little fellow, who teaches him the secret of what is really important in life. Gere reads the part of the Pilot, and Osment takes the part of the Little Prince. The reading by all the participants is accomplished with great skill and feeling. Piano and strings provide very lovely background music composed by Alexandre Stankevicius. This abridged recording of the classic book should be welcome in most library collections.-Beverly Bixler, San Antonio Public Library, TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Young Osment (The Sixth Sense; Pay It Forward) again proves his mettle as an actor, giving voice to the Little Prince in this crisp, full-cast production of the literary classic. He approaches the role with a gentleness and sensitivity that touches the heart and never sounds maudlin. As the pilot whose plane has crashed in the Sahara, Gere plays it low-key, creating a perfect partner for Osment's interplanetary-traveling, wise-beyond-his-years prince. Gere expresses just the right mix of amusement and bewilderment as the prince interrupts the pilot's efforts to repair his plane with a request that he draw a sheep. The adept performances capture the timeless nature of Saint-Exupry's fable about how a child sees the important things in life much more clearly than many adults do. All ages. (Dec.) FYI: Last year marked the 100th anniversary of Saint-Exupry's birth. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
An edition of Saint-Exupéry's most famous work -- a gentle fable of love and peace -- contains a thoughtful assessment of the details of its composition. Included are reproductions of three pages of the original, hand-written French text and twenty-two pages of the original illustrations. But the special allure of the work is still the naively sophisticated, heartwarming tale of the little prince and his small planet. From HORN BOOK 1993, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
"[E]yes are blind. You have to look with the heart," says the little prince, which makes this pop-up edition of the 1943 classic a bit of an odd duck. De Saint-Exupry's minimalist illustrations become full-color paper-engineered elements in a blown-up, two-inch-thick unabridged edition. Flaps lift, figures pop, tableaux emerge in ingenious fashion, creating a reading experience as surreal as the story. But the tension between text and image inherent in any illustrated book is exacerbated to the nth degree here, as the beguiling doodads beckon readers to race through the pages, leaving the story they're meant to illustrate behind. The contemplative fable is turned into a mere excuse for paper whimsy, the fun of making the prince turn to meet the fox overriding the wonder of the interaction. Too cool for its own good. (Pop-up/fiction. 10 up) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
While a pop-up edition of de Saint-Exupéry's enduring tale may initially seem like a gimmick, the resulting volume is a beautiful piece of bookmaking that actually extends the classic story. In 3-D form, the original artwork feels new, and inventive design elements, such as the fold-out windows that reveal the narrator's attempts to sketch a sheep to the Little Prince's specifications, add whimsy while focusing even more attention on the images. As with any edition of The Little Prince, the question of audience remains, but this unabridged volume offers a creative, accessible entrée to the timeless story.--Engberg, Gillian Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
This graphic novel brings the classic fable to life with a new character: the pilot (a stand-in lor the original author) who crash-lands on the Prince's planet. Here we see Saint-Exupéry's plane disappear over the waves, as it did in real life. "The Prince's protracted nighttime goodbye . . . is newly touching, and harrowing," Dan Kois wrote in his review.