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The Little Prince

  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)

Overview

A pilot crashes in the Sahara and meets a small boy who has come from an asteroid the size of a house, where he lives with a rose and three volcanoes. The prince describes his journey through other asteroids, each inhabited by a single adult absorbed in something pointless: a king with no subjects, a businessman counting stars he claims to own, a geographer who has never seen anywhere. On Earth he meets a fox who teaches him that what is essential is invisible to the eye, and that you become responsible for what you tame. Saint-Exupéry, himself a pilot, wrote and illustrated it in exile in New York; he disappeared on a reconnaissance flight the following year.

Notes

A children's book that is mostly read by adults, and the only sentimental book on this list. I keep it here for the fox, and for the portraits of the adults on the asteroids, which are as sharp a set of character studies as anything in Theophrastus. It is also a reminder that meaning is made rather than found, which is my view, delivered more gently than I usually manage.

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