The Little Prince Steps Out on 5th Avenue
You’ve read the book?
Years ago on a solo trip to Paris as a young woman, I arranged to meet a friend’s cousin who lived in the city. He was so very kind, driving me around after dark so I could see Paris, literally, in a new light. He took me to dinner and brought two precious gifts for me: a copy of Camus’s The Stranger and one of Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince, both in French, a language I had just started to learn (needless to say, still learning, still have the books.)
Little did I know that author Antoine de Saint Exupéry actually wrote Le Petit Prince while living in New York City. To celebrate the book’s 80th birthday a few weeks ago (September 20) a four-foot bronze sculpture of Le Petit Prince himself made its debut on NYC’s Fifth Avenue in front of the Villa Albertine, the French Embassy’s bookshop and cultural center. The sculptor? Jean-Marc de Pas.
Le Petit Prince became one of the best-selling books (140 million) of all time, even as critics have debated whether it was a story for children or adults. (“Although it is considered a children's book, The Little Prince addresses life issues related to human nature like friendship, love, loss, and. . . loneliness.”—HubPages.) It has been translated into over 500 languages.
Saint-Exupéry’s biographer Stacy Schiff said of the author (an aviator who died in an accident) and his title character that “the two remain tangled together, twin innocents who fell from the sky.” More than fitting then, that the little interplanetary voyager on Fifth Avenue is, of course, gazing heavenward.
Link to the original story on Hyperallergic—with an additional photo or two— is here. It is there I discovered that while this is a Big Apple story, it has some roots in each of the Twin States. According to her bio, author and photographer of this story at Hyperallergic, Elaine Velie, “is a writer from New Hampshire living in Brooklyn. She studied Art History and Russian at Middlebury College and is interested in art's role in history, culture, and politics.”
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.