The Little Prince

The Little Prince, published in French as Le Petit Prince, is a novella by the French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery, first published in April 1943 in the United States in both English and French editions, with the French edition not reaching liberated France itself until 1945. It is narrated by a pilot who has crash-landed his plane in the Sahara Desert and who encounters a solemn, golden-haired young prince, a visitor from the tiny asteroid B-612, who recounts his travels across a series of small planets, each inhabited by a single adult absorbed in some foolish preoccupation, before arriving on Earth. There the prince meets a fox who asks to be tamed and who teaches him that what is essential is invisible to the eye, a lesson the prince connects to the rose he loved and left behind on his own asteroid. Blending a simple, illustrated fairy-tale style with quietly philosophical reflections on loneliness, love, loss, and the strangeness of adult priorities, the novella became Saint-Exupery's most successful book by far, with roughly 140 million copies sold and, as of a November 2024 count, translations into about 600 languages and dialects, making it the second most translated work ever published after the Bible.