The Mandarins

Henri edits a left-wing newspaper and resists efforts to place it under Communist Party control. Anne, who narrates much of the novel, examines her marriage, her profession, and a transatlantic love affair while trying to understand what responsibility remains after war.

The characters resemble people in Beauvoir's circle, but the novel reorganizes experience rather than providing a key to private lives. Its lasting subject is the position of the public intellectual: close enough to politics to matter, but not entitled to pretend that writing and action are the same thing.

Parisian writers celebrate liberation and immediately divide over how the postwar left should respond to Communism, American power, and evidence of Soviet repression.

Henri Perron tries to protect the independence of his newspaper while his love life and friendships become entangled with the same political struggle.

Anne Dubreuilh travels, works as a psychoanalyst, and begins a serious relationship with an American writer, forcing her to measure personal freedom against commitments already made.