The central incident he wrote of detailed his 1935 plane crash in the Sahara Desert between Benghazi and Cairo, which he barely survived along with his mechanic-navigator, André Prévot.

Saint-Exupéry and his navigator were left almost completely without water and food, and as the chances of finding an oasis or help from the air gradually decreased, the two men nearly died of thirst before they were saved by a Bedouin on a camel.

Although it did not appear in the earliest editions of its English translation, "An Appreciation" was added to later printings, contributed by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and earlier published in The Saturday Review of Literature on 14 October 1939.

[4] In an introduction to the Expo 67 Corporation's book, also entitled "Terre des Hommes/Man and His World", Gabrielle Roy wrote:[5] In Terre des Hommes, his haunting book, so filled with dreams and hopes for the future, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes of how deeply moved he was when, flying for the first time by night alone over Argentina, he happened to notice a few flickering lights scattered below him across an almost empty plain.

Moved as he was by a heightened awareness of the solitude of all creation and by the human need for solidarity, Saint-Exupéry found a phrase to express his anguish and his hope that was as simple as it was rich in meaning; and because that phrase was chosen many years later to be the governing idea of Expo 67, a group of people from all walks of life was invited by the Corporation to reflect upon it and to see how it could be given tangible form.Pascal Gélinas & Pierre Harel's short film Taire des hommes (meaning to silence men) has a title homophonic to the book's title, but is instead about the censorship and repression at the riot of the national holiday of June 24, 1968, in downtown Montréal, one day before the federal election.