Manuscript
The original autographed manuscript of The Little Prince, as well as various drafts and trial drawings were acquired in 1968 by the Pierpont Morgan Library (now The Morgan Library & Museum) in Manhattan, New York City. The manuscript pages includes content that was struck-through and therefore not published as part of the first edition. In addition to the manuscript, several watercolour illustrations by the author are also held by the museum. They were not part of the first edition. The library marked the 50th anniversary of the novella's publication with a major exhibit of Saint-Exupéry's literary works.
In April 2012 a Parisian auction house announced the discovery of two previously unknown draft manuscript pages that had been found and which included new text. In the newly discovered material the Prince meets his first Earthling after his arrival. The person he meets is an "ambassador of the human spirit". The ambassador is too busy to talk, saying he is searching for a missing six letter word, "I am looking for a six-letter word that starts with G that means 'gargling' ", he says. Saint-Exupéry's text does not say what the word is, but experts believe it could be "guerre", (or "war"). The novella thus takes on a more politicized tack with an anti-war sentiment, as 'to gargle' in French is an informal reference to 'honour', which the author may have viewed as a key factor in military confrontations between nations.
Read more about this topic: The Little Prince
Famous quotes containing the word manuscript:
“It is not as easy to emigrate with steel mills as it is with the manuscript of a novel.”
—Golo Mann (b. 1909)
“This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound off with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening.... It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions in which the word “beauteous” was over-fondled, and human experience referred to as “life’s page,” was up to the usual average.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)