Some stories grow with us, even when we have read them before.
The Little Prince is a book of a few thousand words, and it has been read around the world for eighty years. It was first published on 6 April 1943 in New York, by Reynal & Hitchcock, in French as Le Petit Prince and in English translation. The author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was a French writer and pilot living in exile in the United States. The book did not appear in France until 1946, two years after his death in 1944 on a wartime flight.
Neither children's book nor sermon
Is it for children? It has watercolour drawings and a prince from a tiny planet. Is it a fable? A philosophical tale? It is a little of each, and refuses to settle. Saint-Exupéry dedicated it to an adult friend, Léon Werth, "when he was a little boy," which tells you something about the intended reader: anyone willing to remember being small.
The story is simple to describe. A pilot, stranded in the Sahara after engine trouble, meets a small, serious boy who has come from an asteroid. The pilot's predicament echoes Saint-Exupéry's own 1935 crash in the Libyan Desert, which he survived. As the boy tells of his travels, we meet a king, a vain man, a businessman counting stars, a lamplighter and a fox. I won't tell you where it ends.
What it's really about
Friendship and loneliness run through the book, along with responsibility, imagination and the way adults see the world. The prince cares for a rose that is vain and demanding, and slowly understands what it means to be answerable for something you love. The fox explains that to "tame" someone is to build a tie between you, and that this makes each of you matter to the other. Imagination appears in the very first drawing, which grown-ups mistake for a hat.
The book's most quoted line is "L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux," that what matters is invisible to the eye. It is easy to treat it as a motto. I would resist that. The book is gentler and stranger than any single moral. Readers have taken it as a story about grief, about love, about the follies of adult ambition, or about childhood itself, and none of them is wrong.
Small details, large echoes
Saint-Exupéry works through images rather than arguments. The prince's home is a planet barely bigger than a house, where he must pull up baobab seedlings before they split it apart. The lamplighter keeps working long after the reason has gone. The businessman owns the stars and cannot say what for. None of these is explained at length, and each can be read in more than one way: as comedy, as satire, as a gentle warning. The drawings, made by the author himself, do as much work as the words.
A book that changes as you do
Read at eight, it might be a story about a boy, a flower and a fox. At twenty, it may feel like a book about distance and leaving. At fifty, the businessman and the geographer can sting, and the rose looks quite different. Nothing in the text changes. You do. That is why people return to it, and why they find new things.
A friendly place to begin
It is short. It is clear. It is full of images you can hold on to. For anyone nervous of the so-called classics, it is a fine way in: it proves that a famous book can be intimate and unintimidating. It has been translated into hundreds of languages, and each translation gives it a slightly different voice, so it is worth trying more than one.
Welcome to World Classics
The Little Prince is the first article in a new permanent section of Slowchapters called World Classics. Here we will look at enduring books from many countries and eras:
- Famous novels and short books worth discovering.
- The stories and ideas behind influential works.
- What makes certain books last across generations.
- Friendly introductions for readers who want to explore the classics without feeling intimidated.
We are only starting, and nothing below has been written yet. These are possible future features, not reviews already on the site:
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Explore the World Classics section as it grows, and see which enduring stories speak to you. Perhaps you will start with a book you remember from childhood, and find it has quietly grown up too.
