Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone de Beauvoir bigraphy, stories - French existentialist philosopher

Simone de Beauvoir : biography

09 January 1908 – 14 April 1986
"La Beauvoir" redirects here; also see: Beauvoir (disambiguation).

Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, commonly known as Simone de Beauvoir ( 9 January 1908 – 14 April 1986), was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. While she did not consider herself a philosopher, Beauvoir had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.Bergoffen, Debra, "Simone de Beauvoir", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography, monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues. She is best known for her novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, as well as her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women’s oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.

Works

  • L’Invitée (1943) (English – She Came to Stay)
  • Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944)
  • Le Sang des autres (1945) (English – The Blood of Others)
  • Who Shall Die? (1945)
  • Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946) (English – All Men are Mortal)
  • Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (1947) (English – The Ethics of Ambiguity)
  • Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) (English – The Second Sex)
  • L’Amérique au jour le jour (1954) (English – America Day by Day)
  • The Mandarins, (1954)
  • Must We Burn Sade?, (1955)
  • The Long March, (1957)
  • Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, (1958)
  • The Prime of Life, (1960)
  • Force of Circumstance, (1963)
  • A Very Easy Death, (1964)
  • Les Belles Images, (1966)
  • The Woman Destroyed, (1967)
  • The Coming of Age, (1970)
  • All Said and Done, (1972)
  • When Things of the Spirit Come First, (1979)
  • Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, (1981)
  • Letters to Sartre, (1990)
  • A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren, (1998)

Translations

  • Patrick O’Brian was Beauvoir’s principal English translator, until he attained commercial success as a novelist.
  • Philosophical Writings (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2004, edited by Margaret A. Simons et al.) contains a selection of essays by Beauvoir translated for the first time into English. Among those are: Pyrrhus and Cineas, discussing the futility or utility of action, two previously unpublished chapters from her novel She Came to Stay and an introduction to Ethics of Ambiguity.

Prizes

  • Prix Goncourt, 1954
  • Jerusalem Prize, 1975
  • Austrian State Prize for European Literature, 1978

Middle years

Sartre

During October 1929, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir became a couple and Sartre asked her to marry him.Bair, p. 155–156 One day while they were sitting on a bench outside the Louvre, he said, "Let’s sign a two-year lease".Bair, p. 157 Near the end of her life, Beauvoir said, "Marriage was impossible. I had no dowry." So they entered a lifelong relationship.Bair, p. 156 Beauvoir chose never to marry and did not set up a joint household with Sartre. She never had children. This gave her time to earn an advanced academic degree, to join political causes, to travel, to write, to teach, and to have lovers (both male and female – the latter often shared).

Sartre and Beauvoir always read each other’s work. Debates rage on about the extent to which they influenced each other in their existentialist works, such as Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay. However, recent studies of Beauvoir’s work focus on influences other than Sartre, including Hegel and Leibniz.Bergoffen, Debra, "Simone de Beauvoir", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .