Message aux Jeunes Américains
One of only 10 copies on parchment (no. 10), numbered and initialed by the publisher, after a unique copy on Japanese paper.
Portrait of Saint-Exupéry as frontispiece.
Written at the request of American journalist Dorothy Thompson after the United States entered the war, Saint-Exupéry’s address to young Americans was delivered before the Progressive Education Association. Moving beyond the immediate circumstances of war, he reflects on freedom, community, sacrifice and fraternity, calling on the younger generation to understand responsibility as something greater than military duty alone.
The speech first appeared in English in 1942, while Saint-Exupéry’s original French text was long believed lost. Contrary to the later claim that it first appeared in Icare in 1978, Pierre Aelberts had already published it here in this extremely limited 1967 edition.
A very rare deluxe copy of an important Saint-Exupéry wartime text. Fine condition.
Provenance: Pierre Puech collection (Alde, Paris, 2010, no. 370).