Today marks the 82nd anniversary of the disappearance of French writer, journalist, and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. On July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupéry took off in an unarmed P-38 on his ninth reconnaissance mission for the Free French Air Force from an airbase on Corsica, and never returned.
His most famous work, The Little Prince, tells the story of an aviator, downed in the desert and facing long odds of survival (inspired by the author’s own experience crash landing in the Libyan desert in 1935), who encounters a strange young prince, fallen to Earth from a tiny asteroid where he lived alone with a single rose. The rose has made him so miserable that, in torment, he has taken advantage of a flock of birds to convey him to other planets.
As Barry James in The New York Times wrote: “A children’s fable for adults, The Little Prince was in fact an allegory of Saint-Exupéry’s own life—his search for childhood certainties and interior peace, his mysticism,
