Episode Details

The author of one of the world's most delicate fables was a crash-prone, chain-smoking military aviator who wrote his masterpiece in miserable political exile during the most devastating war in history. This episode follows Antoine de Saint-Exupery, nicknamed the Sun King as a golden-haired child, through his years as a celestial navigator in the earliest days of flight and the December 1935 crash in the Sahara during a Paris-to-Saigon air race, when he and co-pilot Andre Prevot survived four days with a thermos of coffee, some wine, an orange, and a few grapes before a Bedouin traveler saved them.

We trace his flight to the United States after the fall of France in 1940, his refusal to side with either de Gaulle or Vichy and the resulting bans on his books, and the midnight writing sessions at a 22-room Long Island mansion fueled by gin and tonics, coffee, and scrambled eggs. The conversation decodes the rose as his wife Consuelo, the volcanoes as El Salvador, the fox as friend Sylvia Hamilton, and the dedication to Leon Werth, hiding in occupied France, before following him back into a P-38 cockpit at 44 and his disappearance over the Mediterranean on July 31, 1944.

• The physiology of desert dehydration, from the moment sweating stops to the hallucinations of phantom lakes
• Why he considered the division among French expatriates morally repugnant
• A 30,000-word draft cut to half its length, and a manuscript stained with coffee and cigarette burns
• The Life magazine deal with John Phillips that got him reinstated to active flight status
• The Morte pour la France designation, a 30-year copyright extension, and translations into over 600 languages