Recommendations
Books Like Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Night Flight — professional obligation and death in the early aviation mail routes
Saint-Exupéry's 1931 Prix Femina novel of a night postal flight over South America — Rivière's decision to drive his pilots in dangerous conditions, Fabien's disappearance; professional obligation as a form of human greatness, preface by Gide.
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Buy on AmazonTerre des hommes
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) — the autobiographical prose memoir that gives the real experiences behind Vol de nuit's fiction; the Sahara and South America of Terre des hommes is the actual world that Fabien's night flight crosses in fictional form.
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Buy on AmazonCourrier Sud
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Southern Mail (1929) — the predecessor novel; the Sahara mail route and the same pilot ethos; reading Courrier Sud before Vol de nuit gives the development of Saint-Exupéry's aviation fiction from its first form.
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Buy on AmazonLe Petit Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Little Prince (1943) — the children's book that became the most translated French book; everything in the novels (the pilot, the essential invisible, the responsibility to what you love) is here in allegorical form; read last in the Saint-Exupéry sequence.
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Buy on AmazonLa Condition humaine
by André Malraux
Malraux's 1933 Prix Goncourt novel is the major contemporary — both are about the question of what makes death meaningful; Malraux's revolutionary solidarity and Saint-Exupéry's professional obligation are different answers to the same question about human dignity in the face of certain death.
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Buy on AmazonPilote de guerre
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Flight to Arras (1942) — the WWII reconnaissance memoir; Saint-Exupéry flying impossible missions in a war already lost, the most politically explicit of his works; the companion to Vol de nuit from a later and darker moment.
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Buy on AmazonThe Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe's 1979 account of the test pilots and astronauts of the early US space program — the closest American parallel to Saint-Exupéry's aviation ethos; both treat the professional courage of elite pilots as a form of human greatness that cannot be reduced to ordinary terms.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Wind, Sand and Stars
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The US title of Terre des hommes — the essential companion memoir; the most direct account of what it felt like to fly the Aéropostale routes; the philosophical meditations on solidarity and the human condition that Vol de nuit enacts in fictional form.
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Buy on AmazonL'Espoir
by André Malraux
Malraux's Spanish Civil War novel (1937) is about flying in a different cause — the Republican air squadron rather than the mail service; but both novels ask the same question about whether professional flying can carry moral weight, and both answer it by showing aviators who die for something beyond themselves.
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