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.
Simone de Beauvoir's L'Amérique au jour le jour is the daily journal she kept during her first American lecture tour, from 25 January to 20 May 1947. The book records a four-month circuit that began at Vassar College and ran through New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Southwest, Texas, the segregated South, and back through Washington, DC — roughly twenty thousand miles of trains, buses, university lecture halls, jazz clubs, and hotel rooms. She met writers and intellectuals in every city, and in Chicago on 21 February 1947 she met the novelist Nelson Algren; the affair that began that week runs, in real time and largely in code, through the second half of the book. The Mandarins seven years later would fictionalise the same trip.
Beauvoir kept the diary as she went, from a spiral notebook. She revised the entries in the summer of 1947 and Gallimard published L'Amérique au jour le jour in Paris in September 1948, with a preface by Nelson Algren's contemporary Richard Wright. Patrick Dudley's English translation appeared from Duckworth in London in 1952, but the definitive English text is Carol Cosman's 1999 translation from University of California Press, which restored passages the Dudley text had abridged. The book is roughly four hundred pages in most editions.
The book is unusual in Beauvoir's writing for being close to real time. Where the memoir volumes were written years or decades after the events they described, America Day by Day is close to reportage. The daily entries — she skips no more than a day or two at a stretch — give the reader Beauvoir observing the postwar United States in a way she never described any other country: fresh eyes, no prior expertise, the writer as visiting European. The result is very valuable and very partial. Beauvoir observes Jim Crow segregation in the South and describes it plainly; she also, in New York and Los Angeles, records generalisations about Americans that a reader in 2026 will find dated. The book is best read with both sides of that in mind.
The Chicago entries are the most read passages. Beauvoir met Nelson Algren on 21 February 1947 at an academic reception. Within a week they were lovers. She spent additional weeks with him in Chicago and travelled with him to New Orleans and along the Mississippi. The affair, which lasted in some form from 1947 through 1951, is coded in the diary — she calls Algren 'N.A.' in most entries — but the emotional shape of it is clear on the page. She was thirty-nine and would return to Chicago every summer for the next three years. The Mandarins would fictionalise the whole encounter as Anne and Lewis Brogan.
The diary begins at Vassar College on 25 January 1947 with Beauvoir's arrival on the SS Cabot Strait after a rough Atlantic crossing. Weeks in New York follow: the Village, Harlem, Broadway, jazz clubs, meetings with Edmund Wilson and Truman Capote and Marc Chagall.
In February she travels west: Chicago (where she meets Nelson Algren), St Louis, New Orleans, and up through the Mississippi to Cincinnati, then across the Southwest to Los Angeles and up the coast to San Francisco.
March and April cover the Southwest, Texas, the segregated South (Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, the Blue Ridge Mountains), and Washington, DC. She returns to Chicago in late April for a week with Algren and sails back to France from New York on 20 May 1947.
Beauvoir's preface makes the diary's sequence an argument about how knowledge is acquired. She explains that she reconstructed it after the trip from notes, letters and fresh memories, keeping the order in which impressions changed. A first judgment is therefore not offered as a verdict on America. Read beside the train-window image, the form gives the traveler a moving, limited viewpoint: she sees particular places under particular conditions, then revises what she thinks. Her presence in the account is not a flaw she promises to remove; it is part of the evidence.
Beauvoir's remark, quoted in Michael Rogin's review, links her greater intimacy with Chicago to deliberately choosing one point of view. Algren's guidance gives the city a human route rather than a comprehensive survey. This is both a gain and a limit: closeness makes particular streets and lives legible, but it cannot make the visitor's perspective universal. Beside the image of their walk, the passage suggests why companionship matters to the diary's way of knowing a place, not only to the later story of their romance.
It shows Beauvoir testing European assumptions against direct observation of the United States immediately after the Second World War.
Read it after The Ethics of Ambiguity and before The Second Sex to follow the movement from ethics into social description.
The travel diary Beauvoir kept on her first four-month American tour in 1947 — the trip on which she met Nelson Algren, an encounter later scored across The Mandarins and her Letters to Nelson Algren.
The diarist. Thirty-nine years old at the trip's start, thirty-nine at its end. Writes the entries in real time between 25 January and 20 May 1947 and revises them in the summer before Gallimard publishes the book in September 1948.
The Chicago novelist Beauvoir meets on 21 February 1947 at an academic reception. Their affair begins that week and runs, in some form, through 1951. Referred to in the diary as 'N.A.' Later the model for Lewis Brogan in The Mandarins (1954).
The American novelist (Native Son, 1940; Black Boy, 1945) and future Paris expatriate. Beauvoir meets him and his family in New York in February 1947. He writes the preface to the 1948 French edition of the diary.
The American writer, then twenty-two and about to publish Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). Beauvoir meets him in New York in February 1947; the entries treat him with a slightly amused affection.
The Russian-French painter, then exiled in New York for the war. Beauvoir visits him in his New York apartment in February 1947. He would return to France later that year.
25 January 1947
Beauvoir arrives at Vassar College on the SS Cabot Strait; the diary begins.
February 1947
New York, then Chicago. On 21 February she meets Nelson Algren at an academic reception.
March 1947
The Southwest, Los Angeles, San Francisco.
April 1947
The segregated South (Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, the Blue Ridge Mountains); Washington, DC; a second week in Chicago with Algren.
20 May 1947
Beauvoir sails from New York back to France on the SS De Grasse.
Summer 1947
Beauvoir revises the diary; the affair with Algren continues by mail.
September 1948
Gallimard publishes L'Amérique au jour le jour in Paris, with a preface by Richard Wright.
1952
Patrick Dudley's abridged English translation appears from Duckworth in London.
1954
The Mandarins wins the Prix Goncourt; the Anne-Brogan plot fictionalises the affair.
1999
Carol Cosman's complete English translation appears from University of California Press, restoring passages the Dudley text had cut.
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.
Read our take
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.
Read our takeIt is Simone de Beauvoir's diary of her first American lecture tour, from 25 January to 20 May 1947 — a four-month circuit from Vassar College through New York, Chicago, the Southwest, California, the segregated South, and back. She records what she saw of Jim Crow segregation, of postwar consumer abundance, of academic and literary America, and — most read of all — the beginning of her affair with the Chicago novelist Nelson Algren.
Gallimard published L'Amérique au jour le jour in Paris in September 1948, with a preface by Richard Wright. Patrick Dudley's English translation appeared from Duckworth in London in 1952. Carol Cosman's complete English translation, restoring passages the Dudley text had abridged, appeared from University of California Press in 1999 and is now the standard English edition.
On 21 February 1947 in Chicago, at an academic reception a Chicago radio-station host named Nelson had arranged. She had gone to see Algren because a French translator had mentioned his work; they went to a Bughouse Square bar together and, within the week, were lovers. The affair runs, in the diary, from that week through her return visits to Chicago in April and (subsequent summers) 1948, 1949, and 1950. The Mandarins (1954) fictionalises the whole encounter.
Beauvoir describes Jim Crow plainly and does not soften it. The chapters on the segregated South (Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, the Blue Ridge Mountains) record specific incidents she witnessed — including the separate drinking fountains, the specific way Black porters and passengers were treated on the trains, the impossibility of eating in the same restaurants as her Black interlocutors. She names the system as apartheid before the term was applied to South Africa.
The Mandarins (1954) fictionalises the affair with Algren as Anne Dubreuilh's affair with Lewis Brogan. Reading the diary's real-time entries from Chicago and New Orleans alongside the fictional Anne/Brogan scenes of the novel gives the reader the two sides of the same trip — the diary as she was living it, the novel as she reworked it seven years later.
In parts, plainly. The book is a European lecture tour of a country the writer had not visited before, and its generalisations about Americans — particularly in New York and Los Angeles — are those of a visitor with four months and an itinerary. The observation of the segregated South and of postwar consumer culture has held up better than the meta-observation of the American national character. The book is best read as reportage rather than as a full account.
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View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document America Day by Day, its publication, and its place in literary history.
The Preface in the public 2025 Vintage Classics sample, translated by Carol Cosman; analysis of the journal's stated method, not a claim to have collated every entry.
Beauvoir's remark about her chosen Chicago viewpoint as quoted in Michael Rogin's review; the mediation is explicitly identified in the analysis.
Publisher record used to verify the 1999 University of California Press edition, ISBN, pagination, and Carol Cosman translation credit.
Used to place America Day by Day within Simone de Beauvoir's published work and verify its bibliographic context.
Used for independent biographical, archival, or historical context surrounding Simone de Beauvoir's career and the period in which America Day by Day appeared.
Used to cross-check authorship, chronology, and the work's place in Simone de Beauvoir's wider catalogue.
Used to verify Simone de Beauvoir's bibliography and place America Day by Day within the broader chronology of Simone de Beauvoir's career.
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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