Blog saint exupery biography stacy schiff
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Stacy Schiff started her publishing career as an editor for Simon & Schuster, where she took on about an equal number of fiction and nonfiction titles. But then she really wanted to see a biography done on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a pilot and writer who penned the classic story The Little Prince. Originally she planned to find a writer for it, but she became so consumed by the subject that she decided to write the book herself. And that is how a biographer was born. “That always happens with biography—you become obsessed with someone else’s life,” says Schiff.
Schiff was born in Adams, Massachusetts, on the other side of the state from Salem, but she says she became interested in the Salem witch trials when she was a teen. She says, “Everybody goes through a Salem phase.” However, Schiff’s obsession grew into a five hundred–page book, The Witches: Salem, 1692.
Schiff is interested in giving women a voice, and much of her writing has focused on those who couldn’t tell their stories, such as Cleopatra and Véra Nabokov, determined to show what was the truth. Unfortunately, it was difficult for her to find a voice from any of the teenage accusers during the Salem witch trials. At that time, women were taught to read the Bible, but not to write. “Could one of these g
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Saint-Exupéry
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GoodReads meta-data is 560 pages, rated 4.03 by 262 litizens.
Genre: Biography
Verdict: He returned to the stardust from whence he came.
First an anecdote to create a climate of expectation:
In the 1930s a journalist telephoned a dispatch back to a Paris newspaper to an experienced secretary who was typing his report as he spoke, and …. then she stopped. The editor supervising the exchange asked if the line had been cut. No, she said, sobbing, she could not bear to go on, so moving, so simple, so powerful, so emotional, so direct was the prose of Saint Ex describing the workers with whom he had ridden in Moscow subway car.* You and I, Reader, would have seen a shabby and no doubt odoriferous collection of tired men and women going about their dreary business. But Saint Ex saw the essence and put it into words. (This secretary, by the way, was no ingenue, but rather a crusty veteran who had seen and heard it all, she thought, and that is why she was assigned this transcription.)
Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint Exupéry (1900-1944) was born to be the poet of the air, and he succeeded in that, if in little else.
He was a dreamy, undisciplined man-child born to impoverished nobles, who fell further with the death of his father when the boy was four. The fam