Looking Outward Card

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry (b. 1900) was born into an aristocratic Lyon family, fallen on hard times. He flunked out of the Naval Academy and the École des Beaux-Arts, before finally discovering his true love: aviation. Saint-Exupéry flew mail routes in North Africa and South America, surviving crashes and other scrapes, about which he wrote movingly. In 1940 he fled collaborationist France for America, which he urged to join in the fight against fascism. Though older, and injured, he joined the Free French Air Force, fighting with the Allies in the Mediterranean. He was shot down over Provence in July, 1944.