Wind, Sand and Stars

A memoir in essays by a pilot who flew the early airmail routes — Toulouse to Dakar, then the Andes — written before the war that killed him. The centrepiece is his 1935 crash in the Libyan desert with his navigator and the days they spent walking without water before a Bedouin found them. Around it Saint-Exupery writes about what the work taught him: that a craft imposes its own standards, that responsibility for a machine and a route is a form of moral education, and that what makes a life is obligation rather than freedom from it.

It won the U.S. National Book Award and the Académie française’s Grand Prix du Roman in 1939.

Context: The only non-American and non-anglophone author in this shard, and the list’s entry on vocation as a moral category — closest in spirit to Rocket Boys, furthest in circumstance.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Antoine de Saint-Exupery — the author, an Aeropostale pilot who disappeared on a reconnaissance flight in 1944.
• Technological Innovation — aviation in the decade when it was still mostly nerve and dead reckoning.
• Leadership — responsibility for a machine, a route and a crew as Saint-Exupery’s school of character; courage, on his account, is a by-product of duty rather than a virtue pursued directly.
• Republic of Letters — a working pilot who wrote as well as anyone of his generation.