Simone de Beauvoir Books

Beauvoir's first novel: an established Parisian couple's promise of freedom is tested — and shattered — by the younger woman they invite into their lives.

Beauvoir's Resistance novel, written in secret in Occupied Paris and published at the Liberation — an ethical thriller about a man who cannot forgive his own privilege and the woman he sends into a mission she may not survive.

A twentieth-century Parisian actor meets a man who cannot die, and asks him to remember her. His answer runs seven centuries and every version of that promise.

Beauvoir's Prix Goncourt novel: a six-hundred-page roman à clef of the Parisian intellectual left in the four years after Liberation — Sartre, Camus, Koestler and Nelson Algren all present under lightly changed names.

Beauvoir's late short novel about a Paris advertising executive and the polished consumer world that has trained her, her family, and her ten-year-old daughter to see other people's suffering as a stain to be removed from the picture.

Three long stories of middle-aged women whose lives are coming apart — Beauvoir at her most Chekhovian, in the fiction that best carries the analysis of women's mid-life she had made in The Second Sex twenty years before.

Beauvoir's earliest book — five linked stories about young Catholic bourgeois Paris women written in 1935–37, rejected by Gallimard and Grasset, and published only forty-two years later as a document of the author before she had learned to write.

Beauvoir's only completed play, written under the Occupation and staged in Paris in October 1945 — a besieged fourteenth-century Flanders town choosing which of its own people it will not feed.

Beauvoir's diary of her four-month lecture tour across the United States in 1947 — the trip on which she met Nelson Algren, an encounter later scored across The Mandarins and her Letters to Nelson Algren.

Beauvoir's 1957 book on her two-month trip to Mao's China — the most politically contested of her nonfiction, a document of what a serious European left intellectual could and could not see in the People's Republic in the mid-1950s.

The first volume of Beauvoir's memoirs: a bourgeois Catholic Paris childhood, the loss of faith, philosophy at the Sorbonne, and a friendship whose ending she said cost her her freedom.

The second memoir volume, covering Beauvoir from her 1929 meeting with Sartre through the Occupation and the Liberation of Paris — the years the intellectual partnership at the centre of her life was built and tested.

The third and longest volume of Beauvoir's memoirs: the eighteen years from the Liberation of Paris in August 1944 through 1962, the years in which she wrote The Second Sex and The Mandarins, met Nelson Algren, campaigned against French torture in Algeria, and became one of the most-watched public intellectuals in Europe.

Beauvoir's hundred-page account of her mother's month-long death from cancer in a Paris clinic — the shortest and most direct book she wrote, and the case study The Coming of Age would turn into general argument six years later.

The fourth and final volume of Beauvoir's memoirs — written at sixty-four with the whole life visible behind her, organised by theme rather than chronology, and containing the reckoning with 'I was cheated' that Force of Circumstance had ended on.

Beauvoir's account of Sartre's last ten years — the blindness, the strokes, the political engagements, the dependence on her care — followed by the 1974 interviews the two of them recorded together, the most direct testimony we have of what fifty years of that partnership actually consisted of.

Beauvoir's first philosophical essay, written under the Occupation and published a few months after the Liberation — the shorter, earlier statement of the argument The Ethics of Ambiguity would work out at book length three years later.

Beauvoir's 1947 essay giving existentialism the ethics Sartre never got around to writing — the philosophical statement of the argument She Came to Stay had put in a novel and The Second Sex would put in a thousand pages two years later.

Beauvoir's thousand-page 1949 argument that femininity is made and not born — the founding book of second-wave feminism and the century's most influential work of feminist philosophy.

Beauvoir's long 1951–52 essay on the Marquis de Sade for Les Temps modernes — the philosophical argument that turned Sade from a scandal into a serious moral problem for postwar existentialism.

Beauvoir's six-hundred-page 1970 study of old age — the companion volume to The Second Sex, arguing that Western societies treat their elderly as a scandal to be hidden and that this is a decision, not a fact.