Wind, Sand and Stars.

SAINT-EXUPERY, Antoine de.

Item Number: 93478

New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939.

First edition of Saint-Exupery’s philosophical memoir of flight. Octavo, original half cloth, pictorial endpapers. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, (translated from the French), “For Bill Donovan, because I wrote almost half of this book in his home. With my most faithful friendship and all my gratitude for happy days at his home. Antoine de Saint-Exupery.” The recipient William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat. He is best remembered as the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II. He is also known as the “Father of American Intelligence” and the “Father of Central Intelligence.” The CIA regards Donovan as its founding father, according to journalist Evan Thomas in a 2011 Vanity Fair profile. In the article Thomas observed that Donovan’s “exploits are utterly improbable but by now well documented in declassified wartime records that portray a brave, noble, headlong, gleeful, sometimes outrageous pursuit of action and skulduggery.” A statue of him stands in the lobby of the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia. A veteran of World War I, Donovan is the only person to have received all four of the United States’ highest awards: The Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the National Security Medal.  He was also a recipient of the Silver Star and Purple Heart, as well as decorations from a number of other nations for his service during both World Wars. Some offsetting to the pages with newspaper clippings laid in, very good in a very good dust jacket. One would be hard pressed to find a better association.

“Everything went into Wind, Sand and Stars: the Saharan flights and crashes; the South American flights and near-crashes; the Libyan adventure; Guillaumet in the Andes; the enchanted evenings… Combined-with a dash of mysticism and a generous sprinkling of hymns to fraternity-those writings make for some of the most glorious descriptions of flight ever published…. ‘To read it is to forget we are earthbound,’ raved the Atlantic reviewer” (Schiff, 306-8). The American Booksellers Association voted Wind, Sand and Stars the best non-fiction work of 1939 while the French version, Terre des hommes, received the Academie Francaise’s prize for best novel of the year.