The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
French author and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died in 1944. But before his death, he did the literate world a huge favour and wrote a stunning and enigmatic novel about a little prince from a tiny planet in outer space. The nice thing about being a little prince from a small planet in outer space is that it gives one quite a unique perspective on the rest of the universe—if, of course, this little particular prince has the gumption to head out into that wide universe.
And that, in a phrase, was the point of Saint-Exupéry’s most famous novel, The Little Prince. In it he documents the foibles of the wide world from the perspective of a person who has never lost his sense of wonder.
The Little Prince describes his own purpose in much the same way. “I have friends to discover and a great many things to understand,” the Little Prince laments to one friend he comes across in his voyages. But, “men have no time to understand anything,” replies his wise and cynical friend. “They buy things all ready made at the shops.”
