Antoine de Saint-Exupery - Biography, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Filmography (Read)

Antoine de Saint-Exupery - biography, date of birth, place of birth, filmography, clips, Writer.

June 29, 1900, Lyon, France - July 31, 1944, Mediterranean Sea - famous French writer, poet, essayist and professional pilot. Viscount.

The family came from an old family of the Perigord nobles. Antoine (his family nickname was "Tonio") was the third of five children, he had two older sisters - Marie-Madeleine "Bichet" and Simone "Monod" - the younger brother of Francois and the younger sister of Gabriela "Didi". Exupery spent his early childhood in an apartment on Rue Peyrat in Lyon, but in 1904, when Antoine was 4 years old, his father died of intracerebral hemorrhage, after which Antoine began to spend six months of the year in the castle of the commune, which belonged to his great-aunt - Marie, Viscountess Tricot Saint-Maurice-de-Rement in the department of Ain, and the rest of the time at the apartment of the Viscountess Tricot in Place Bellecour in Lyon or in the castle of the commune of La Mol in the Var department with Marie's parents. This continued until the summer of 1909, when the Saint-Exupery family moved with Antoine to Le Mans, to the house number 21 on the street Clos-Margot.

Exupery began attending the School of the Christian Brothers of Saint Bartholomew in Lyon in 1908, and after the family moved to Le Mans together with his brother Francois he studied at the Jesuit College of Saint Croix - until 1914.

In 1912 Saint-Exupery took to the air for the first time on an airplane at the airfield in Ambrieu-en-Buge. The car was driven by the famous pilot Gabriel Wroblewski.

In 1914-1915, the brothers studied at the Jesuit College Notre-Dame-de-Montreux in Villefranche-sur-Saone, after which they continued their studies in Friborg (Switzerland) at the Marist College Villa-Saint-Jean - until 1917, when Antoine successfully passed the undergraduate exam. On July 10, 1917, Francois died of rheumatic heart disease, his death shocked Antoine. In October 1917, Antoine, preparing for admission to the Ecole Naval, took a preparatory course at the Ecole Bossu, Lyceum Saint-Louis, then, in 1918, at the Lycee Lacanal, but in June 1919 he failed in the oral entrance exam at Ecole Naval ". In October 1919, he enrolled as a volunteer at the National Graduate School of Fine Arts in the department of architecture.

The turning point in the fate of Antoine was 1921, when he was drafted into the army. Interrupting the grace period he received upon entering the university, Antoine enrolled in the 2nd Fighter Regiment in Strasbourg. At first he was assigned to the work team at the repair shops, but soon he managed to pass the exam for a civilian pilot. Exupery was transferred to Morocco, where he received the rights of a military pilot, and then sent to Istres for improvement. In 1922, Antoine completed courses for reserve officers in Avora and was promoted to second lieutenant. In October, he was assigned to the 34th Aviation Regiment at Bourget near Paris. In January 1923, the first plane crash happened to him, Exupery received a head injury. In March he was discharged. Exupery moved to Paris, where he took up literature.

Only in 1926 did Exupery find his calling - he became a pilot of the Aeropostal company, which delivered mail to the northern coast of Africa. In the spring, he began to work on the transport of mail on the Toulouse - Casablanca line, then Casablanca - Dakar. On October 19, 1926, he was appointed head of the Cap Jubi intermediate station (Villa Bens), on the very edge of the Sahara. Here he wrote his first work - the novel "Southern Postal".

In March 1929, Saint-Exupery returned to France, where he entered the higher aviation courses of the navy in Brest. Soon, the publishing house of Gallimard published the novel Southern Postal, and Exupery went to South America as the technical director of Aeropost Argentina, a subsidiary of Aeropostal. In 1930, Saint-Exupery was promoted to the Knight of the Legion of Honor for his contribution to the development of civil aviation. In June, he personally took part in the search for his friend, pilot Henri Guillaume, who had an accident while flying over the Andes. In the same year, Saint-Exupery wrote the novel "Night Flight" and met his future wife - Consuelo from El Salvador.

In 1930 Saint-Exupery returned to France and received a three-month leave of absence. In April, he married Consuelo Sunxin (April 16, 1901 - May 28, 1979), but the spouses usually lived separately. On March 13, 1931, Aeropostal was declared bankrupt. Saint-Exupery returned as a pilot on the France-Africa postal line and served the Casablanca-Port-Etienne-Dakar section. In October 1931, the novel Night Flight was published, for which the writer was awarded the Femina literary prize.

From February 1932, Exupery worked for the airline Latecoera; as a co-pilot, he flew a seaplane serving the Marseille-Algeria line. Didier Dora, a former Aeropostal pilot, soon hired him as a test pilot, and Saint-Exupery nearly died while testing a new seaplane in Saint-Raphael Bay.

Since 1934, Exupery worked for Air France (formerly Aeropostal); as a company representative he traveled to Africa, Indochina and other countries.

In April 1935, as a correspondent for the Paris-Soir newspaper, Saint-Exupery visited the USSR and described this visit in five essays. The essay "Crime and Punishment in the Face of Soviet Justice" became one of the first works of Western writers in which an attempt was made to comprehend Stalinism.

Soon Saint-Exupery became the owner of his own aircraft C.630 "Simun" and on December 29, 1935, he attempted to set a record for the Paris-Saigon flight, but crashed in the Libyan desert, again narrowly avoiding death. On January 1, he and the mechanic Prevost, dying of thirst, were rescued by the Bedouins.

In August 1936, as a correspondent for the Entrancian newspaper, Exupery traveled to Spain, where the civil war was raging, and published a number of reports in the newspaper.

In January 1938, aboard the Ile de France liner, Exupery sailed to New York, where he began work on a collection of autobiographical essays, The Planet of Men. On February 15, he began the flight New York - Tierra del Fuego, but suffered a serious accident in Guatemala, after which he recovered his health for a long time, first in New York, and then in France.

On September 4, 1939, the day after France declared war on Germany, Saint-Exupery appeared at the mobilization site at the Toulouse-Montodran military airfield and on November 3 was transferred to the 2/33 long-range reconnaissance air unit, which was based in Orconte (Champagne province). This was his response to the persuasion of friends to abandon the risky career of a military pilot. Many have tried to convince Saint-Exupery that he will bring much more benefit to the country as a writer and journalist, that pilots can be trained in thousands and that he should not risk his life. But Saint-Exupery achieved an appointment to the combat unit. In one of his letters in November 1939, he wrote: “I am obliged to participate in this war. Everything I love is at stake. In Provence, when the forest is on fire, everyone who cares grabs buckets and shovels. I want to fight I am forced to do this by love and my inner religion. I cannot stand aside and calmly look at it. "

Saint-Exupery flew several combat missions on a Block 174 aircraft, performing aerial reconnaissance missions, and was nominated for the Military Cross award. In June 1941, after the defeat of France, he moved to his sister in an unoccupied part of the country, and later left for the United States. He lived in New York, where in 1942 he created his most famous work "The Little Prince", published a year later in French and English with illustrations by the author (in France, the tale was published in 1946). In 1943 he joined the Fighting France Air Force and with great difficulty achieved his enlistment in the combat unit. He had to master piloting the new high-speed P-38 Lightning.

On July 31, 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupery departed from Borgo airfield on the island of Corsica on a reconnaissance flight and did not return.

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Author: Jane Watson