You might think The Little Prince was written in some quaint French village by a man sipping red wine. Most people do. But the reality is way weirder. It was actually born in a rented mansion in New York and a penthouse on Central Park South.
If you’re looking for the exact date, here it is: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry started writing and illustrating the book in the summer of 1942. It wasn't finished until late that year, and it finally hit the shelves in April 1943.
It's a wartime book. Honestly, it’s a refugee book.
Saint-Exupéry wasn't even supposed to be a writer. He was a pilot. He flew mail across the Sahara. He crashed in the Libyan desert (which, fun fact, is the actual event that inspired the book's opening). When the Nazis occupied France in 1940, he fled to the United States. He spent about two years in exile, miserable and grumpy, eating too many scrambled eggs and struggling to learn a single word of English.
He wrote it here. In America.
The 1942 Summer That Changed Literature
The timeline for when was The Little Prince written is actually pretty compressed. While the ideas had been rattling around Saint-Exupéry's head for years—he’d been doodling a little guy with wings or a scarf on napkins and letters since the 1930s—the actual "pen-to-paper" moment happened in 1942.
Elizabeth Reynal, the wife of one of his American publishers, supposedly saw these doodles and suggested he write a children’s story to calm his nerves. He was a wreck. France was under the boot of the Gestapo, and he wanted to be in the air, not trapped in Manhattan.
He moved into "The Bevin House" in Asharoken, Long Island, during that summer. It was a massive, 22-room mansion. He’d work all night, fueled by coffee and cigarettes, frequently waking up guests at 2:00 AM to show them a watercolor of a baobab tree or a fox. He was obsessive. He’d write a page, tea-stain it, crumple it, and rewrite it ten times.
By the fall of 1942, the manuscript was mostly done.
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But it wasn't published in France. Not then. Because of the war, the book was first released in New York by Reynal & Hitchcock in April 1943. It came out in both English and French simultaneously. If you want to get technical, the "true" birth of the book is 1943, but the labor occurred throughout 1942.
Why the Timing of 1943 Matters More Than You Think
The world was on fire.
In April 1943, the tide of World War II was just starting to turn, but everything was still terrifying. This context is vital because people often treat The Little Prince like a soft, fluffy bedtime story. It isn't. It’s a book about a man dying of thirst in a desert while the world he knows disappears.
Saint-Exupéry left New York almost immediately after the book was published. He didn't even stay to see it become a hit. He gave the original manuscript—a mess of coffee-stained onionskin paper—to his friend Silvia Hamilton in a crumpled brown paper bag and headed to North Africa to join the Free French Air Force.
"I’d like to give you something splendid," he told her, "but this is all I have."
He never saw the book's success in his homeland. He disappeared over the Mediterranean in July 1944, likely shot down by a German pilot, though his plane wreck wasn't found until 2000. It wasn't until 1946, after the Liberation, that Gallimard was finally able to publish the book in France.
For the French, the book is a post-war treasure. For the rest of the world, it’s a 1943 New York original.
The New York vs. Paris Discrepancy
There is often confusion about the dates because of these two separate launches.
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- New York (1943): The actual first edition.
- Paris (1946): The edition that made it a national icon.
The French version actually had to have the illustrations re-engraved because the original American plates weren't available. This led to some slight color differences that collectors still argue about today.
Was it Actually Written for Children?
Sorta. But not really.
The dedication is the giveaway. He dedicates it to Leon Werth, but specifically to "Leon Werth when he was a little boy." Werth was a Jewish writer living in hiding in France at the time. Saint-Exupéry was writing a message to a friend who was starving and cold.
When you realize when was The Little Prince written, the "grown-ups" in the book start to look a lot like the bureaucrats and Vichy collaborators Saint-Exupéry hated. The King who has no subjects? The Businessman counting stars he doesn't own? Those are biting political critiques.
It’s a heavy book wrapped in a yellow scarf.
He spent months agonizing over the tone. He wanted it to be simple enough for a child but sharp enough to hurt an adult. He supposedly cut out massive sections of the book, including a scene where the Prince visits an inventor who gives him a gadget that satisfies all human desires. He realized it was too cynical. He wanted something more "pure."
The Lost Pages
In 2012, two previously unknown pages of the manuscript were found in a private collection. They showed the Prince visiting a "man from the planet of the crossword puzzles." The guy is too busy looking for a six-letter word for "gargle" to talk to the Prince.
Saint-Exupéry cut this. Why? Because by late 1942, he realized the book needed to be shorter and more poetic. The deadline was looming. He was also losing his mind with loneliness. He was living in the "Twin Peaks" apartment on Central Park South toward the end of the writing process, and he would watch the city lights and feel like he was on another planet.
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That feeling of being an alien in New York is exactly why the Prince feels like an alien on Earth.
Real-World Facts You Can Fact-Check
- The Plane: The P-38 Lightning Saint-Exupéry flew when he disappeared was found near Marseille.
- The Manuscript: The original 141-page manuscript is held by the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan. It stayed in New York.
- The Rose: Most scholars agree the Rose is based on his wife, Consuelo. She was Salvadoran, fiery, and they had a famously turbulent marriage. She wrote her own memoir, The Tale of the Rose, which wasn't published until 2000.
- The Fox: This character was likely inspired by a fennec fox Saint-Exupéry encountered while flying mail in Cape Juby, Morocco, in the late 1920s.
How to Read It Today
If you want to appreciate the book, you have to stop looking at it as a Hallmark card.
Read it as a document from 1942. Read it as a suicide note from a pilot who knew his time was up. He literally wrote, "I shall look as if I were suffering. I shall look a little as if I were dying," in the final chapters. Then, a year after writing that, he actually disappeared.
It’s haunting.
The book has now been translated into over 500 languages and dialects. Only the Bible and the Quran have more translations. It sells about two million copies every year. Not bad for a book written by a guy who was mostly just trying to distract himself from a world war.
Actionable Insights for Readers and Collectors
If you're looking to dive deeper into the history of this 1943 masterpiece, here is how to do it properly:
- Visit the Morgan Library: If you are in New York, go see the original manuscript. You can see the tea stains. You can see the cigarette burns. It makes the "legend" feel very human.
- Look for the 1943 Edition: If you're a book collector, the "True First" is the Reynal & Hitchcock edition with the "386 Fourth Avenue" address on the dust jacket. It's worth a fortune.
- Read the "Unabridged" Letters: To understand the mindset of 1942, read Letters to a Hostage. It’s a shorter work Saint-Exupéry wrote around the same time. It’s much darker and provides the "adult" context for the Prince’s sadness.
- Compare Translations: The original 1943 translation by Katherine Woods is the most "poetic," while the 2000 translation by Richard Howard is considered more "accurate" to the French. Read both. They feel like different books.
The Little Prince wasn't written in a vacuum. It was written in a fever dream of exile, war, and a desperate hope that people would eventually remember how to be children again. It’s a New York story, a French story, and, ultimately, a story that belongs to anyone who has ever looked at the stars and felt a little bit lonely.