Simone de Beauvoir

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posed questions many men, and women, had yet to ponder when the book was released in 1953. "One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should ...," she says in this comprehensive treatise on women. She weaves together …

The Mandarins is a 1954 roman à clef by Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir was awarded the Prix Goncourt prize in 1954 for The Mandarins. It was first published in English in 1956. The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French intellectuals from the end of World War II to the mid fifties. The title …

The lost novel from the author of The Second SexWhen Andrée joins her school, Sylvie is immediately fascinated. Andrée is small for her age, but walks with the confidence of an adult. The girls become close. They talk for hours about equality, justice, war and religion; they lose respect for their teachers; they build …

The Ethics of Ambiguity is Simone de Beauvoir's second major non-fiction work. It was prompted by a lecture she gave in 1945, after which she claimed that it was impossible to base an ethical system on her partner Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical work Being and Nothingness. The following year, over a six-month …