De Kleine Prins is het verhaal van een piloot die na een noodlanding in de woestijn een bijzonder jongetje ontmoet. Het jongetje, de kleine prins, vertelt hem over de planeet waar hij woont, over andere planeten die hij bezoekt en over hun merkwaardige bewoners. Het is een verhaal vol diepe Ñ Tot ziens, zei de vos. Hier is mijn geheim. je kan alleen goed zien met je hart. Waar het echt om gaat, kan je niet goed zien met je ogen. Dit prachtige moderne sprookje is geliefd bij iedereen. De schitterende illustraties zijn van de auteur. Erik van Muiswinkel verzorgde de nieuwe vertaling, welke naast de volledige Latijnse tekst staat. Antoine de Saint-ExupŽry (1900-1944) was een Franse schrijver en piloot. Hij schreef De Kleine Prins een jaar voor zijn dood. In dienst van de geallieerden werd hij in de Tweede Wereldoorlog in 1944 neergeschoten boven de Middellandse Zee. De eerste uitgave verscheen in 1943 in de Verenigde Staten zowel in het Frans als in het Engels. De eerste Nederlandse uitgave verscheen in 1951. Het boek, in meer dan 400 talen vertaald, is nog steeds een wereldwijde bestseller. Het geheim van De Kleine Prins is onzichtbaar, maar vanaf de eerste zin gloeit het door de onsterfelijke woorden en tekeningen heen.
People best know French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry for his fairy tale The Little Prince (1943).
He flew for the first time at the age of 12 years in 1912 at the Ambérieu airfield and then determined to a pilot. Even after moving to a school in Switzerland and spending summer vacations at the château of the family at Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens in east, he kept that ambition. He repeatedly uses the house at Saint-Maurice.
Later, in Paris, he failed the entrance exams for the naval academy and instead enrolled at the prestigious l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1921, Saint-Exupéry, stationed in Strasbourg, began serving in the military. He learned and forever settled his career path as a pilot. After leaving the service in 1923, Saint-Exupéry worked in several professions but in 1926 went back and signed as a pilot for Aéropostale, a private airline that from Toulouse flew mail to Dakar, Senegal. In 1927, Saint-Exupéry accepted the position of airfield chief for Cape Juby in southern Morocco and began his first book, a memoir, called Southern Mail and published in 1929.
He then moved briefly to Buenos Aires to oversee the establishment of an Argentinean mail service, returned to Paris in 1931, and then published Night Flight, which won instant success and the prestigious Prix Femina. Always daring Saint-Exupéry tried from Paris in 1935 to break the speed record for flying to Saigon. Unfortunately, his plane crashed in the Libyan Desert, and he and his copilot trudged through the sand for three days to find help. In 1938, a second plane crash at that time, as he tried to fly between city of New York and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, seriously injured him. The crash resulted in a long convalescence in New York.
He published Wind, Sand and Stars, next novel, in 1939. This great success won the grand prize for novel of the academy and the national book award in the United States. Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance missions at the beginning of the Second World War but went to New York to ask the United States for help when the Germans occupied his country. He drew on his wartime experiences to publish Flight to Arras and Letter to a Hostage in 1942.
Later in 1943, Saint-Exupéry rejoined his air squadron in northern Africa. From earlier plane crashes, Saint-Exupéry still suffered physically, and people forbade him to fly, but he insisted on a mission. From Borgo, Corsica, on 31 July 1944, he set to overfly occupied region. He never returned.