Poet and Pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Best known today as the author of The Little Prince, Saint-Exupery was also acclaimed in his time as a novelist, a poet, a pioneer of airmail flights in the 1920s, and as a pilot during World War II. On 31 July 1944, he took off from Sardinia on a reconnaissance mission over Southern France. He never returned. He was 44. This book documents some of the last weeks of Saint-Exupery's life in photographs taken by his friend John Phillips, a photographer for Life magazine. The photographs were shot at an air base on Sardinia during May 1944. They are accompanied by a facsimile of a letter written by Saint-Exupery during the night of May 29-30 1944, as well as a brief biographical essay by Charles-Henri favrod and a memoir by John Philips.