The Little Prince
SynopsisPlot
A pilot crashes in the Sahara Desert and encounters a strange young boy who calls himself the Little Prince. The Little Prince has traveled there from his home on a lonely, distant asteroid with a single rose. The story that follows is a beautiful and at times heartbreaking meditation on human nature.
Story
About this book
A pilot stranded in the Sahara Desert meets a small boy who says he comes from a tiny asteroid far away. The Little Prince describes his life there, tending volcanoes and pulling up baobab seedlings before they can overrun his small world, and speaks of a single rose whose demands confused him enough to leave. His travels took him past asteroids where solitary adults sat absorbed in narrow work.
On Earth he meets a fox who explains how bonds are made, and a snake who answers in riddles. Through these meetings the book considers how grown-ups lose track of what matters and how attachment to another living thing can be both costly and necessary. The desert scenes and the imagined planets keep the scale moving between the intimate and the cosmic.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a French aviator and writer, first published the story in 1943 and drew the watercolour illustrations himself, including the images of the prince, the rose and the fox. He had crashed in the Sahara in 1935, and that experience sits behind the narrator's situation. The book has since appeared in hundreds of languages and dialects.
