Beauvoir, Simone de, << bohv WAHR, see MAWN duh >> (1908-1986), was a French author. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she met the philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre. The ideas they shared were later called existentialism (see Existentialism).
Beauvoir’s existentialist works include her first novel, She Came to Stay (1943), and her essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). She also wrote plays about politics and social freedom. Her long essay The Second Sex (1949) discusses woman in the modern world. She frequently wrote or spoke in support of equal rights for women and ethnic minorities, improved conditions for workers, and justice for victims of war crimes.
Beauvoir wrote a four-volume autobiography. The first of these books, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), tells of her youth and early studies. In The Prime of Life (1960), Beauvoir recalled her experiences during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II (1939-1945). The third volume of her memoirs, Force of Circumstances (1963), describes postwar France until the 1954 revolution in the French colony of Algeria. She discussed her life from 1962 to 1972 in All Said and Done (1972).
Beauvoir was born in Paris on Jan. 9, 1908. She died on April 14, 1986. A collection of her fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic writings was published as The Useless Mouths in 2011, after her death. A previously unpublished novel called Inseparable was published in French in 2020 and in English translation in 2021. It tells the story of the close friendship between two girls growing up in France after the end of World War I in 1918.
