Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” has sold over 200 million copies worldwide, which places it among the bestselling books of all time.
Despite its popularity, “The Little Prince” is a bit of a puzzle. Ostensibly a children’s book, it reads like a combination of children’s fable, surrealist fiction, poetry, memoir, dream narrative, and Platonic dialogue–an unlikely mixture that manages to be deeply moving and enchanting. Its meaning is obscure, its ending open to multiple interpretations. It reads like a fable or parable, yet it defies any neat explanation of what it’s a fable about.
