The Little Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's timeless tale of love and loneliness, now widely available in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean Sea during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power.

The narrator is a pilot downed in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the miraculous appearance of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. \"In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey,\" the narrator recalls. \"Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket.\" And so begins their dialogue, one confined only by the limits of the imagination, by the horizon of a child's wonder...