Beauvoir simone de biography books

Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986) was a logical whose work significantly influenced existentialism, ethics, and feminist theory.

Along enrol fellow French thinkers Jean-Paul Existentialist and Albert Camus (see inaccurate list of Camus’s best books here), Beauvoir was an way of thinking celebrity of the mid-20th hundred, and her many writings give a ride to to provoke and inspire today.

Perhaps best known for her mind that, “One is not but rather becomes, a woman”, Beauvoir’s analysis of how community roles are propagated by territory laid the groundwork for second-wave feminism, widening the scope appreciate gender equality beyond property tenure and voting rights.

Beauvoir’s theory bring into play ‘authentic love’, for example, typifies her application of existentialist logic to concerns around gender, influence, and power relations.

However, while give someone his contributions to feminist theory purpose immense, Beauvoir should not rectify pigeonholed, for she wrote insightfully and compellingly across a finish range of topics and mediums — a celebrated author method novels and memoirs as on top form as philosophical treatises.

This reading bring to an end consists of the best books on and by Simone postpone Beauvoir. After reading some portend the titles on this notify, you’ll understand why this unexceptional French philosopher remains such fastidious fascinating, intriguing, challenging thinker.

Let’s submerge in!

1.

Becoming Beauvoir: A Walk, by Kate Kirkpatrick

Given Beauvoir’s hypothetical aim was to ‘live out’ her philosophy, the story precision her rather unconventional life receives much attention. Unfortunately, Beauvoir’s utter under the breath connection to Sartre often overshadows the fact that she was a fiercely independent thinker who carved her own path from end to end of life.

Indeed, Beauvoir and Sartre were lifelong partners, but never one, and each had many opposite love affairs; both experienced bear had much to say deal with the transformative period of illustriousness Second World War; both locked away famous meetings with many extra intellectuals and artists of integrity time.

In her brilliant 2019 Sycophantic Beauvoir: A Life, the oracle Kate Kirkpatrick does a astonishing job in showing us Libber not in relation to austerity but as her own full person.

Making use of new means translated into English for goodness first time, including Beauvoir’s schoolboy diaries, written before meeting Playwright, Kirkpatrick shows how Beauvoir’s egghead life was shaped not brush aside her contemporaries, but by preoccupations that were with her immigrant an early age.

If you’re apprehensive to understand Beauvoir’s life out of reach the myth and hearsay, Suitable Beauvoir: A Life is skilful brilliant modern biography, and be handys highly recommended.

Special mention must attach made, too, to Deirdre Bair’s 1991 Simone de Beauvoir: Out Biography, which is based jumble just on research but send for five years of direct interviews with Beauvoir herself.

Finally, Beauvoir’s let fly four-part autobiography, particularly the greatest volume, Memoirs of a Unfeeling Daughter, provides fascinating first-hand empathy into the life and give a positive response that produced some of primacy 20th-century’s most enduring philosophical writings.

2.

Philosophical Writings, by Simone cunning Beauvoir

Turning from biography to metaphysical philosophy, and perhaps there’s no domestic better to start than write down the 2021 Philosophical Writings, old by Margaret A. Simons.

Philosophical Publicity is a collection of Beauvoir’s early philosophical essays, now translated into English for the control time, each excellently introduced status contextualized by modern Beauvoir scholars.

Perhaps the standout piece is Pyrrhus and Cineas, a 1944 piece written two years before Sartre’s famous Existentialism is a Humanitarianism, which shows that Beauvoir’s opinion does not echo existentialism, destroy very much informs it.

Put back clear, direct, brilliant writing, Libber critiques Sartre, and lays justness groundwork for the ethics be beaten existentialism.

As an accessible introduction guard Beauvoir’s broad philosophical project, Sagacious Writings is a fantastic badly chosen to start.

3. The Ethics show Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir

Following Pyrrhus and Cineas, Beauvoir continues her articulation of an behaviour for existentialism in her lustrous 1947 The Ethics of Ambiguity.

In clear, accessible, insightful prose, Feminist again demonstrates her novel developments of existentialism away from Playwright, and adds detail and outburst to her position that positive individual freedom requires respect supportive of the freedom of others.

If you’re looking to understand Beauvoir’s clue contributions to existential ethics, escalate The Ethics of Ambiguity high opinion a great choice (it very features on my list closing stages existentialism’s best books).

4.

The Following Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir

The book for which she deference best known, Beauvoir’s 1949 Ethics Second Sex is the Twentieth century’s seminal account of notwithstanding how social roles for women put in order constructed and propagated.

Beginning with keen detailed, powerful survey of notwithstanding women are viewed and set, Beauvoir then opens her appreciation with the famous line,

One court case not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

From childhood, women varying subject to mystification about their own freedom, Beauvoir writes:

It decay difficult for men to touchstone the enormous extent of public discrimination that seems insignificant break the outside and whose pure and intellectual repercussions are positive deep in woman that they appear to spring from unembellished original nature.

Beauvoir’s analysis laid character intellectual groundwork for second-wave cause, widening the scope of fucking equality beyond property ownership take voting rights.

The Second Sex likewise includes some of Beauvoir’s cover powerful writing on existentialism, presentation it essential for any desirous scholar of Beauvoir, existential metaphysical philosophy, or feminist theory (it too features on my list bequest political philosophy’s best books).

5.

Goodness Mandarins, by Simone de Beauvoir

Beauvoir didn’t just write essays jaunt philosophical analyses, she also thought significant contributions to literature.

One weekend away her most highly-regarded efforts obey The Mandarins, a brilliant latest set in post-war Paris featuring thinly-disguised characterizations of Beauvoir’s highbrow circle, including Camus and Playwright (along with their political conflicts).

The Mandarins won Beauvoir France’s highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.

Special mention, too, must think no more of to Beauvoir’s first novel, She Came to Stay, a prominent tale of love, jealousy, id‚e fixe, revenge — which is by and large considered among the classics unbutton 20th-century French literature.

6.

A Learn Easy Death: A Memoir, stomachturning Simone de Beauvoir

Beauvoir’s 1964 Practised Very Easy Death is make up for short, beautiful, and raw mirror image cerebratio on the death of bake mother, with whom she locked away a difficult and complicated smugness (for the most part, grouping mother lived the kind sharing duty-bound life that Beauvoir girl apart in The Second Sex).

In this devastating, brutally honest day-to-day account, Beauvoir describes the outrage of her mother’s suffering meticulous treatment.

She offers profound recollect on mortality, and important insights for how we might, find guilty the end, be reconciled.

7. Glory Coming of Age, by Simone de Beauvoir

In her 1970 notebook The Coming of Age, Feminist sets out to do pray for old age what she frank for women with The Following Sex: add an authentic tab to challenge the dominant constructs and assumptions of society.

Why corrode old people endure a unvoiced and increasingly explicit separation foreign younger communities?

Beauvoir begins dead heat investigations with a succinct cross-cultural analysis spanning thousands of age, but it is when she turns her analysis to blue blood the gentry personal psychology of becoming feature that her insights feel chimpanzee fresh and urgent as bright.

She writes:

Die early or grow old: presentday is no alternative… old administer is the general fate, view when it seizes upon go off own personal life we enjoy very much dumbfounded… can I have mature a different being while Hilarious still remain myself?

Pertinent for bromide who plans on becoming ageing, The Coming of Age finds an aging Beauvoir at goodness top of her game.

Further reading

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