Wind, Sand and Stars

Wind, Sand and Stars (French title: Terre des hommes) is a memoir by the French aristocrat aviator-writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and a winner of several literary awards. It deals with themes such as friendship, death, heroism, and solidarity among colleagues, and illustrates the author's opinions of what makes life worth living.

It was first published in France in February 1939, and was then translated by Lewis Galantière and published in English by Reynal and Hitchcock in the United States later the same year.

In his autobiographical work Saint-Exupéry, an early pioneering aviator, evokes a series of events in his life, principally his work for the airmail carrier Aéropostale. He does so by recounting several episodes from his years flying treacherous mail routes across the African Sahara and the South American Andes. The book's themes deal with friendship, death, heroism, camaraderie and solidarity among colleagues, humanity and the search for meaning in life. The book illustrates the author's view of the world and his opinions of what makes life worth living.

The central incident he wrote of detailed his 1935 plane crash in the Sahara Desert between Benghazi and Cairo, which he barely survived along with his mechanic-navigator, André Prévot. Saint-Exupéry and his navigator were left almost completely without water and food, and as the chances of finding an oasis or help from the air gradually decreased, the two men nearly died of thirst before they were saved by a Bedouin on a camel.

The book was first published in France in February 1939, and was then translated by Lewis Galantière and published in English by Reynal and Hitchcock in the United States later the same year. The French and English versions of this book differed significantly; Saint-Exupéry removed sections from the original French version he considered inappropriate for its targeted U.S. audience, and added new material specifically written for them, and Lewis Galantière translated the revised book into English. Although it did not appear in the earliest editions of its English translation, "An Appreciation" was added to later printings, contributed by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and earlier published in The Saturday Review of Literature on 14 October 1939.

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