Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyon,^, France, in 1900, into an ancient and aristocratic family – as may be deduced from his many names – but one with little fortune: during his entire life, in fact, he is tormented by economic difficulties. In 1921, he obtained both civil and military pilot licenses. Then, in 1926, he started working for the company Aéropostale and, in the same year, he published the story The Aviator. His writing activity (Courrier Sud, Vol de Nuit and Terre des Hommes, that in 1939 won him a highly regarded prize from the Académie Française) developed simultaneously with his more and more exotics flight schedules (from Toulouse and Dakar to Buenos Aires and Santiago del Chile first, and then in Indochina and North Africa). The work of an aviator, in a period where air navigation was done by sight and where the pilots oriented themselves using the stars and land features, requested discipline and a considerable courage: Saint-Exupéry was always eager to get return to flying even after various accidents, among which was one where he crashed in the middle of a desert, 200km from Il Cairo and that would become the very autobiographic beginning of Le Petit Prince. In 1939, he enlisted in the military forces, undertaking many dangerous missions that inspired him to write the novel Pilote de Guerre. In 1940, after the occupation of France by Germany, he emigrated in the United States, where in 1943 he joined the French free forces as a pilot. On July 31^st 1944, his plane was shot down and sank in the sea off the coast of France. Only in 2008, was the mistery of his death revealed: the German pilot Horst Rippert had shot down the plane of the writer, knowing but ignoring the fact that it was him.