The Little Prince

The Little Prince is one of those rare books that operates on entirely different levels depending on when you read it. A child encounters a charming story about a tiny prince who travels from asteroid to asteroid meeting strange grown-ups. An adult encounters a devastating meditation on loss, love, loneliness, and the way maturity slowly blinds us to what matters.

A pilot crashes in the Sahara Desert and meets a small boy who claims to come from a tiny asteroid where he tends a single, vain rose and cleans out the baobab seedlings before they can overtake his world. The prince has left his rose after a quarrel and visited six other asteroids, each inhabited by an adult consumed by a single obsession — a king who rules nothing, a vain man who craves applause from no one, a drunkard who drinks to forget that he drinks. On Earth, the prince befriends a fox who teaches him the book's most famous lesson: that to tame something is to establish ties, and that what makes his rose special is the time he has invested in her.

Saint-Exupery wrote this during his exile in New York, homesick and heartsick, and the ache of it saturates every watercolor illustration and every deceptively simple sentence. He disappeared over the Mediterranean a year after publication. The book reads like a man saying goodbye to everything he loves.

The Little Prince is the most translated non-religious book in human history, and that alone would earn it a place on any list. But numbers do not explain why people weep over a story about a boy and a flower. The reason is that Saint-Exupery achieved something nearly impossible: he wrote a book that is genuinely simple and genuinely profound at the same time.

The lessons of The Little Prince — that what is essential is invisible to the eye, that you become responsible for what you tame, that grown-ups have forgotten how to see — are not platitudes. They are hard-won truths delivered with the precision of a poet who happened to also be a combat pilot. Saint-Exupery knew loneliness, knew danger, knew the specific ache of loving something fragile in a brutal world. His fable is not naive. It is wise.

Very few books cross every boundary of age, culture, and language. The Little Prince has been read by children in over 300 languages and by adults in every country on earth. It endures because it tells the truth about what we lose when we grow up and what we must fight to remember.

Published in 1943 in New York (Saint-Exupery's French publisher was occupied by the Nazis), The Little Prince has sold over 200 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 300 languages and dialects — making it the most translated book ever published outside of religious texts. It has been adapted into a musical, an opera, a ballet, a 1974 film starring Gene Wilder and Bob Fosse, and a critically acclaimed 2015 animated feature. The phrase "What is essential is invisible to the eye" has entered common parlance worldwide. Saint-Exupery's watercolor illustrations have become iconic; the little prince standing on his asteroid is one of the most recognized images in world literature. A French 50-franc note featured his portrait alongside the prince.