LAND OF MEN - Lot 19

LAND OF MEN SAINT-EXUPÉRY (Antoine de). Autograph manuscript. One p. folio on orange paper; erasures and corrections. BEAUTIFUL PASSAGE OF A RECIT DESTINE A TERRE DES HOMMES, "Le Pilote et les puissances naturelles", in a version with significant variants from the final text published in 1939. "After hundreds and hundreds of kilometers of arid moors, we were flying over Commodoro Rivadavia, a land as bumpy as an old cauldron..." Writing of Terre des hommes began in 1932 and was completed in 1938: this major book in Saint-Exupéry's oeuvre was published almost simultaneously in France, by Gallimard (March 1939), and in the United States by Reynal and Hitchcock, in English translation by Lewis Galantière (June 1939). The two published versions differed significantly, however, beyond translation issues: the American publishers asked for certain passages to be removed, and commissioned an additional chapter from Saint-Exupéry, which he wrote in July 1938, before leaving New York. This chapter, of which he told Lewis Galantière that "the subject had been maturing in [him] for several years", and of which he had in fact already written a few lines in 1932, recounted a flight he had taken in 1930 on the east coast of Patagonia, between Trelew and Comodoro Rivadavia, where he had been caught in a cyclone. Saint-Exupéry had sent this additional chapter to Gallimard, but as the book was already in press, it was not included in the French edition. He therefore published it separately in France on August 16, 1939, in the weekly Marianne, an offshoot of Gallimard, under the title "Le Pilote et les puissances naturelles". In 1956, it was included in the posthumous collection Un Sens à la vie, then in 2009 as an appendix to Terre des hommes in the Œuvres complètes published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.