Between 1926 and 1939, four of his literary works were published: the short story The Aviator, novels Southern Mail and Night Flight, and the memoir Wind, Sand and Stars.

[8][9][10][Note 1] His father, an executive of the Le Soleil (The Sun) insurance brokerage, died of a stroke in the train station of La Foux before Saint-Exupéry's 4th birthday.

[13] After twice failing his final exams at a preparatory Naval Academy, Saint-Exupéry entered the École des Beaux-Arts as an auditor to study architecture for 15 months, again without graduating, and then fell into the habit of accepting odd jobs.

Saint-Exupéry, influenced by the urgings of the family of his fiancée, future novelist Louise Lévêque de Vilmorin, subsequently left the air force to take an office job.

His duties included negotiating the safe release of downed fliers taken hostage by Saharan tribes, a perilous task that earned him his first Légion d'honneur from the French Government in 1939.

[32] On 14 January 1941, at a Hotel Astor author luncheon attended by approximately 1,500, he belatedly received his National Book Award for Wind, Sand and Stars, won a year earlier while he was occupied witnessing the destruction of the French Army.

[3] During this period, he authored Pilote de guerre (Flight to Arras), which earned widespread acclaim, and Lettre à un otage (Letter to a Hostage), dedicated to the 40 million French living under Nazi oppression, in addition to numerous shorter pieces in support of France.

[40][41][Note 3] After he returned from his stay in Québec, which had been fraught with illness and stress, the wife of one of his publishers helped persuade Saint-Exupéry to produce a children's book,[42] hoping to calm his nerves and also compete with the new series of Mary Poppins stories by P.L.

[46] In April 1943, following his 27 months in North America, Saint-Exupéry departed with an American military convoy for Algiers, to fly with the Free French Air Force and fight with the Allies in a Mediterranean-based squadron.

However, Saint-Exupéry had been suffering pain and immobility due to his many previous crash injuries, to the extent that he could not dress himself in his own flight suit or even turn his head leftwards to check for enemy aircraft.

[47] Saint-Exupéry was assigned with a number of other pilots to his former unit, renamed Groupe de reconnaissance 2/33 "Savoie", flying P-38 Lightnings, which an officer described as "war-weary, non-airworthy craft".

After wrecking a P-38 through engine failure on his second mission, he was grounded for eight months, but was then later reinstated to flight duty on the personal intervention of General Ira Eaker, Deputy Commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces.

His prodigious studies of literature gripped him and on occasion, he continued his readings of literary works until moments before takeoff, with mechanics having warmed up and tested his aircraft for him in preparation for his flight.

Saint-Exupéry frequently flew with a lined notebook (carnet) during his long solitary flights and some of his philosophical writings were created during such periods when he could reflect on the world below him.

[53][Note 6] Saint-Exupéry's last reconnaissance mission was to collect intelligence on German troop movements in and around the Rhone Valley preceding Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France.

[39][57] In September 1998, to the east of Riou Island (south of Marseille), a fisherman found a silver identity bracelet bearing the names of Saint-Exupéry, his wife Consuelo, and his American publisher, Reynal & Hitchcock.

[26] Announcement of the discovery was an emotional event in France, where Saint-Exupéry was a national icon, and some disputed its authenticity because it was found far from his intended flight path, implying that the aircraft might not have been shot down.

Hermann Korth published his war logs, noting an incident that occurred at around noon on 31 July 1944 in which a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 shot down a P-38 Lightning.

[65][67][Note 10] In 1972, the German magazine Der Landser quoted a letter from Luftwaffe reconnaissance pilot Robert Heichele, in which he purportedly claimed to have shot down a P-38 on 31 July 1944.

[71] In the lists which are held by the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, no victory was credited to Heichele or his unit in either July or August 1944, and the decrypted report of the day's reconnaissance does not include any flights by 2./NAG 13's Fw 190s.

[Note 11][73] In 2008, a French journalist from La Provence, who was investigating Saint-Exupéry's death, contacted former Luftwaffe pilots who flew in the area of Marseille, eventually getting an account from Horst Rippert (1922–2013).

[80][81][Note 14] Very little German documentation survived the war, and contemporary archival sources, consisting mostly of Allied intercepts of Luftwaffe signals, offer no evidence to verify Rippert's claim.

One biographer wrote of his most famous work: "Rarely have an author and a character been so intimately bound together as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his Little Prince," and remarking of their dual fates, "...the two remain tangled together, twin innocents who fell from the sky.

His journalistic writings for Paris-Soir, Marianne and other newspapers covered events in Indochina and the Far East (1934), the Mediterranean, Soviet Union and Moscow (1935), and the Spanish Civil War (1936–1937).

[98][89] Other shorter pieces include (in French except where translated by others to English):[94][98] Pilote de guerre (Flight To Arras), which describes the German invasion of France, was slightly censored when it was released in its original French during wartime by Éditions Gallimard in his homeland in 1942, due to the removal of a derogatory remark which was made about Hitler (which Gallimard failed to reinsert in subsequent editions after World War II).

Even though both men were working to free France from Nazi occupation, Saint-Exupéry viewed de Gaulle with apprehension as a possible post-war dictator, and he consequently provided no public support to the General.

C'est sentir, en posant sa pierre, que l'on contribue à bâtir le monde" (to be a man is to be responsible, to feel that by laying one's own stone, one contributes to building the world)The main street of the town of Campeche on the Ilha da Santa Catarina (where Florianopolis the capital of the state is also situated), is named avenida principe pequeno because of his connection to the region.