Who Wrote The Little Prince Synopsis Commonly Found Online?

My librarian habits kick in whenever someone asks about authorship of popular summaries. The canonical author of the novella is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and the original French title is 'Le Petit Prince'. But the snippet-style synopsis you often find on the internet is rarely directly by him — after all, he wrote the whole story, not the modern one-paragraph pitches.

Those short synopses are typically the work of editors at publishing houses, catalogers at libraries, freelance reviewers, or volunteer contributors on crowd-sourced sites. In some cases a publisher’s dust-jacket blurb becomes the de facto synopsis that gets reused across retailer sites and reading lists. Other times, academic or study-guide organizations write their own versions to emphasize themes like childhood, loss, and philosophical reflection. If you’re trying to credit a particular write-up, look for an ISBN, a publisher name, or a website byline; you can also search a distinctive sentence in quotes to see where it first appeared. I often track blurbs back to the first English publisher or a major review outlet, and that usually points to the human hand behind the summary.

I still get a little thrill when I think about that tiny prince standing on his asteroid, so here's the short, chatty take: the book itself — titled 'Le Petit Prince' in French and most popularly known in English as 'The Little Prince' — was written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. What you see as a neat synopsis floating around the web, though, usually isn’t his work; it’s a condensed summary penned by editors, teachers, or fans who wanted to give readers a quick taste.

In my experience hopping between Goodreads blurbs, publisher pages, and school study guides, the synopses often converge on the same handful of lines because folks are summarizing the same iconic beats: the pilot crashed in the desert, the boy from another world, the meetings with bizarre adults, and the gentle, melancholy lessons about love and seeing with the heart. Some sites use publisher blurbs (from first editions or later reprints), others rely on user contributions or rewrites of Wikipedia’s lead paragraph. If you want to trace the exact source of a particular synopsis, check the page credits or the publisher’s note — that usually points you to who wrote the copy. I love how many people keep sharing it; every variation says something about how readers connect with the story.

I get asked this in reading groups a lot: who actually wrote the little online summaries of 'The Little Prince'? The core text was written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, published during World War II, but the bite-sized synopsis you see on summary sites, bookstore listings, or reading guides is usually crafted by someone at the website or by a community contributor. For example, publishers will create a blurb for the back cover, sites like SparkNotes and CliffsNotes compose study summaries, and places like Goodreads often show short, user-made descriptions.

A quick way to find the origin is to look for a byline or a publisher’s name on the page. If there’s none, it’s probably a paraphrase lifted from a common source like Wikipedia or the dust-jacket copy. Either way, the heart of that synopsis traces back to Saint-Exupéry’s storytelling, even if his exact words aren’t what you’re reading online.

People mix this up all the time, but the story was written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — 'The Little Prince' (originally 'Le Petit Prince'). The tiny online summaries you see are not his; they’re usually written by site editors, bookstore staff, or readers who want a quick overview. When I’m browsing, I look for a byline, a publisher credit, or matching text elsewhere to figure out who actually wrote a particular synopsis. If none of that shows up, it’s probably a generic blurb adapted from a publisher’s jacket or a popular public summary, which explains why so many versions sound almost the same.