Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, And Interviews - Plot & Excerpts
As I was writing the last words of the first paragraph in the second section printed above (“living on his small planet like some latter-day Little Prince”), I was reminded of the fact that The Little Prince was written in New York. Few people know this, but after Saint-Exupéry was demobilized following the French defeat in 1940, he came to America, and for a time he lived at 240 Central Park South in Manhattan. It was there that he wrote his celebrated book, the most French of all French children’s books. Le Petit Prince is required reading for nearly every American high school student of French, and as was the case with so many others before me, it was the first book I happened to read in a language that wasn’t English. I went on to read more books in French. Eventually, I translated French books as a way of earning my living as a young man, and at a certain point I lived in France for four years. That was where I first met F. and became familiar with his work. It might be an outlandish statement, but I believe it is safe to say that if I hadn’t read Le Petit Prince as an adolescent in 1963, I never would have been in a position to receive F.’s book in the mail thirty-seven years later.
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