Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
His Life and Times
Cate, Curtis
No great French writer of recent times - with the sole exception of Andre Malraux - experienced such an adventure-packed life as Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Born in 1900, Saint-Exupery's precocious enthusiasm for heavier-than-air machines antedated his first flight in 1912. The books he later wrote afford us occasional glimpses of what it was like to fly in the "heroic years" of the Latecoere airline. In this book - the first full-length biography of Saint-Exupery to have been written in English - one is made to relive a storm over Murcia or flying for hours over hostile stretches of the Sahara.
But Saint-Exupery was infinitely more. Here for the first time has been chronicled his youthful passion for Louise de Vilmorin which was to inspire his first novel Courrier Sud. Adrienne Monnier, Jean Provost, Sylvia Beach, Hemingway and Joyce; Andre Gide and Gaston Gallimard, Caresse Crosby the patroness of Surrealist letters, Maurice Maeterlinck the playwright, Alexander Korda the film magnate, these are some of the colourful figures who flit across these pages against the turbulent background of the Paris of the twenties and thirties.
Here too we are shown a hitherto unknown Saint-Ex: getting himself sent to Morocco by General Nogues in June 1940 to see if it is possible to carry on the struggle in North Africa; being received by Petain at Vichy; crossing swords with Maritain and the Gaullists in New York; vainly trying to warn Giraud of the fate that clearly awaited him; and finally attempting to get the O.S.S. to parachute him into France in a desperate endeavour to limit the fratricidal feuds of his compatriots. Artist and man of action, Saint-Exupery was a spell-binding story-teller a mathematician and inventor. He was also a profound thinker who had a prophetic awareness of where the contemporary world is headed. As Curtis Cate shows in his concluding chapter, the message of Saint-Exupery is as alive and meaningful today as it was when he wrote his major works - Wind, Sand, and Stars, Flight to Arras, The Little Prince, and Citadelle.
Hardcover with dust jacket
608 Seiten / pages
many photos
very good condition
London - 1970 - Heinemann
Art.Nr. 14395
