The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

'It reminds us of that beginning of the story: What is essential is what you can't see, what's inside the snake, what's inside your heart.' 'What is essential is invisible to the eye,' Nelson says. When you ask people their favorite part of The Little Prince, so many talk about the boa constrictor eating the elephant, how adults only see it as a hat or the final drawing of a sheep, just three holes in a box and the secret told to the Little Prince by the fox. 'He says, 'If we got everyone on Earth together for a big meeting, we could fit everyone onto a small Pacific Island.' But in the manuscript, instead of a Pacific Island, it's Long Island.' 'We think we dominate the Earth, and yet we really don't take up so much space at all,' Nelson paraphrases Saint-Exupery. There's a section where the narrator talks about humans' inflated sense of self. These were all deleted from the final text. Nelson points to references of Long Island and Manhattan 'It's very tiny, but you see it.' There are pages of writing, all in French - he never mastered English - all sections of the book that were deleted, including several adventures on Earth. The pictures evolve from an adult who looks like the author, with thinning hair and a bow tie, to the Little Prince. The Morgan Library and Museum bought the original manuscript of The Little Prince in 1968, along with many other drawings, including precursors to what ended up in the book. Saint-Exupery also wrote the book in Manhattan. 'I think he talks about falsehood, or untruths, or hypocrisy, or duplicity in a very charming way, actually.' 'I think it's about life and death, and what's important in life,' she says. She has copies of The Little Prince in some 30 languages. His wife, Laurie Kefalidis, has stood in the room where Saint-Exupery wrote, and is happy about the book's connection to her house. It was something known in the community, but not in many other places.

When the late Nikos Kefalidis bought the house on Beven Road in Northport, Long Island, in the late 1970s, he knew that 30 years before, Saint-Exupery had written and illustrated part of Le Petit Prince in that house. Try Long Island - as in Long Island, N.Y. If asked where you think the book was written, you might say Paris.

Published in 1943, almost two million copies are sold every year, in about 250 languages. One of the world's most beloved books is The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupery.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry