Terre des hommes

In January 1938, Saint-Exupéry arrived in the United States for the first time to attempt the New York–Tierra del Fuego raid. He already enjoyed a solid reputation thanks to the translations of Night Flight (Vol de nuit) in 1932 and Southern Mail (Courrier Sud) in 1933. He already had in mind his next book, then provisionally titled “Étoiles par grand vent,” a collection of scattered texts previously published in the weekly and daily press — Marianne (1932–1934), La NRF (1933), Air France Revue (1935), Minotaure (1935), L’Intransigeant (1936–37) and Paris-Soir (1936–1938) — which he decided to gather in full. This unusual genesis says much about the changing status of the writer between the two world wars, and about the evolving media through which his work, journalistic as it was, reached its readers.

Riad Sattouf’s illustrations for this edition will be a landmark: they mark an unexpected yet strikingly apt encounter between a major twentieth-century literary text and the graphic universe of one of the most influential illustrators of his generation. Born in Paris in 1978, of French-Syrian descent, twice winner of the Fauve d’or at Angoulême (2010, 2015) and awarded the Grand Prix de la Ville d’Angoulême in 2023, Riad Sattouf established himself in the 2000s with a deceptively simple, deeply narrative style, which here finds an unexpected but natural home. “Illustrating Saint-Exupéry’s aviation novels has always been a secret dream,” he confides. For twenty years, a portrait of the writer-aviator has watched over his desk; one morning, realizing he had grown older than Saint-Exupéry at his death, he felt “authorized.” He describes a book “that elevates,” shot through with “the desert, brotherly friendship, action, death, the melancholy of existence, and wonder at the beauty and brutality of the world.”

Published in 1939, Terre des hommes remains one of the spiritual summits of Saint-Exupéry’s work: a meditation on the Aéropostale, an inner aviation journal, a manifesto of human responsibility. Sattouf’s graphic intervention weakens neither its gravity nor its moral density; on the contrary, it reveals its initiatory dimension, the tension between untouched childhood and tragic awareness. This edition is accompanied by an exhibition and sale at the Galerie Gallimard (October 3, 2025 – January 17, 2026, extension included), presenting signed art prints, original drawings and an exceptional group of archival material from family and editorial collections: manuscript, unpublished corrected typescript, correspondence, photographs and autograph editions from 1939, offering a rare documentary counterpoint to the illustrator’s contemporary work. A deluxe copy standing at the crossroads of modern bibliophily, literary history and current graphic art, destined to become a lasting reference in the publishing history of Terre des hommes.