Is The Little Prince really a children's book?

The Little Prince is one of the best-selling books ever published, with an estimated 140 million copies sold, and it has been translated into around 600 languages and dialects. That alone suggests it is not only children who are buying it.

The story

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French writer and aviator, and he wrote and illustrated the book himself. He wrote it in 1942 while living in the New York area, and it was first published in April 1943 in the United States, by Reynal & Hitchcock, in English and in French. The French edition from Gallimard followed in 1945, after the liberation of France.

A pilot crashes in the Sahara. While he tries to repair his plane, a small boy appears: a prince from a tiny asteroid, known as B-612. Over the following days the prince tells the pilot about his home, his beloved and difficult rose, and the journey that brought him to Earth by way of a series of small planets, each inhabited by a single adult absorbed in some peculiar occupation. On Earth he meets more creatures, and learns something about friendship and what it costs.

That is as much as we will say. The book is short, and its ending deserves to be met fresh.

Why it reads as an adult book

The dedication tells you. Saint-Exupéry dedicated the book to his close friend Léon Werth, a grown-up, and in the dedication he half-apologises to children for doing so, reminding them that every adult was once a child. The book is addressed to the child inside the adult as much as to actual children.

The satire is aimed at grown-ups. The planets the prince visits are a gallery of adult habits: vanity, self-importance, counting things for the sake of counting, following orders that no longer make sense. Children find the characters funny. Adults recognise their colleagues, and occasionally themselves.

The themes are big. Loneliness, love that is hard work, the responsibility of caring for someone, the pain of leaving. These are not usually the stuff of picture books.

The tone is melancholy. It is gentle and often funny, but there is a sadness under it that adults feel much more sharply than children.

Reading it at different ages

• As a child, it is a strange, beautiful adventure with drawings, a talking fox and a boy who lives on a planet the size of a house.
• As a teenager, it can feel like a book that understands you better than the adults around you do.
• As an adult, it becomes a book about the people you have loved, the ones you have lost, and the things you stopped noticing.
• On a reread, years later, a different line of the story will land hardest each time. That is the mark of the real thing. See our page on rereading for more on why.

It also makes an excellent book to read aloud to a child, precisely because the adult reading it is getting a different book at the same time.