In his biography, Curtis Cate quotes publication figures for Saint-Exupéry's books as listed in the 1970
Quid" almanac: almost two and a quarter million copies of
Vol de nuit had been sold, and well over a million and a half of
Terre des hommes and
Le Petit Prince each. He is the only author of the century to have three books among the top ten best-sellers of the period. (There are two by Albert Camus.)
He is not a great novelist in the manner of Balzac or Proust, not a powerful creator of characters and their own fictional society, but his books all reflect a vision which is immediately recognizable as his and which transforms ordinary perception. Both his two fictional works--based considerably on personal experiences--and the more numerous volumes in which he speaks directly of his own and his companions' activities and meditates on their meaning provide to the reader not only a thrilling vicarious experience of flight but also an invitation to see the world and its dilemmas from perspectives that are at once characteristic of the author and nearly universally recognizable.
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