ST EX A Prince in His Citadel (art book)

St Ex was born in Lyon into an aristocratic milieu built on an architecture of classical values evoking the Marquise de Sévigné, lace, children's afternoon teas beneath the trees of a family garden as vast as a park… He died 44 years later, encapsulated at the controls of a stratospheric reconnaissance aircraft foreshadowing the age of astronautics. Between his arrival on Earth and his departure into a summer sky, he lived the adventure of the pioneers of commercial aviation within the legendary Aéropostale, inhabited the desert of the Atlantic coast of the Sahara in an environment evoking the planet Mars, and criss-crossed the South American continent from tropical Brazil to Cape Horn aboard aircraft of wood and canvas. He began to write, became a great reporter and witness to his times by covering the Spanish Civil War, captivated all of literary Paris with his accounts rewarded by the Prix Femina and the Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française — accounts that crossed the North Atlantic and fascinated New York publishers who propelled him alongside Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck into the first division of American literature when "Wind, Sand and Stars" was named Book of the Year in the United States. He loved women — numerous and always exceptional — with fascination, passion and respect. He forged among his fellow aviators brotherhoods of immense purity, and endured improbable jealousies and malice. He fought the most calamitous of wars, that of the defeat of 1940, as a potentially sacrificed pilot. Then he lived in New York when it was the most majestic of the world's free cities, in the midst of war. And because he was built on those classical values gathered in the sense of honour, he wanted, when events allowed, to become a soldier-aviator once more, despite his age and a body worn out by too many excesses and accidents. He schemed to achieve his ends, and ended up in the steel cockpit of an ultra-modern flying torpedo for its era — an unarmed warplane equipped with cameras for strategic reconnaissance. And it killed him. He could have remained in New York, living luxuriously off his celebrity and the royalties of his work, awaiting a very probable Nobel Prize in Literature — for when one signs "Le Petit Prince", one reaches far beyond the universe of literature alone. But he was a man of honour and believed that in order to have the right to write and to speak, one must earn that privilege… Here then is his story, in words and illustrations, signed by two authors who share with St Ex that respectful fascination of aviators for nature and its majestic truths.