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book1943

The Little Prince

Disciplines:
philosophy
fiction
france
children

Summary

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's 1943 illustrated novella — about a pilot stranded in the Sahara who meets a prince from a tiny planet — the most widely translated French-language book and the fourth best-selling book ever published.

Core Contribution

Creates the philosophical children's book for adults — The Little Prince reads as a children's story but its themes (the loss of childhood imagination and wonder in adulthood; 'It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye') are the most compressed philosophical wisdom in popular fiction.

Historical Influences

Saint-Exupéry's flying experience Romanticism

Intellectual Lineage

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Reynal & HitchcockGallimard Written in exile in New York during WWII

Allied Works

Night Flight Totto-Chan Alice in Wonderland

Contemporaries & Peers

No recorded contemporaries.

Minds Influenced

Children's philosophical literatureFrench culture

Intellectual Posterity

The Little Prince The Fox'What is essential is invisible to the eye' Baobab trees

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The Little Prince

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