Vol de nuit
In 1929, having become operations director for the airline Aeroposta Argentina, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was tasked with opening a route to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, some 2,500 kilometers south of Buenos Aires. Two years after Courrier Sud, he produced a masterpiece confirming his talent, driven by a humanism and a passion for remote lands and for the men who explored and inhabited them.
It was also a literary triumph. The book, with a preface by André Gide, was warmly received by the public, and at rue Sébastien-Bottin there were hopes of a literary prize. It won the Prix Femina, an honor Saint-Exupéry received with surprise and gratitude, noting how touched he was to see his book so honored by women, since they had seemed to him almost foreign to his novel: “The man who dresses at night to take, in the sky, at the front of a mail plane, his turn of watch already seems to detach himself from his home, […] and to regard the exercise of happiness as a game, a leisure. The pleasure of a night flight is so intense that already, watching its flight from the window, one takes on the soul of a hunter, and I have seen many comrades, sound and rugged men, no longer bear any comparison between love and their profession, as if they were at last going to occupy themselves with solid, grave, real things, and leave their wives without apparent regret, even a little disdainfully, with a naive pride. […] I should like to speak to you of happiness. I should like to make you understand how great this role is. And I imagine it is a little like yours, since we receive from you, in reward, human virtues, the patience of a nurse at a sickbed, the devotion of elder sisters. In short, the human virtues that recharge the heart and give happiness, in the home, its fragile countenance.”
Vol de nuit sold more than 150,000 copies, and Jacques Guerlain, in tribute, launched a perfume of the same name. In the United States, the book — immediately translated as Night Flight — became a bestseller and was selected by the Book of the Month Club.
Its success only grew over the years, and after the war Vol de nuit was among the first novels to be reissued in paperback format, in 1953, in the Livre de poche series, where it appeared as no. 3 (after Koenigsmark and Les Clés du royaume).