Facts about Simone de Beauvoir
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Born into a bourgeois Catholic family, de Beauvoir studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure and passed her agrégation exam in 1929, finishing second only to Sartre.
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Beauvoir's 1945 philosophical work The Blood of Others examined moral responsibility during wartime, drawing directly from her experiences living in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.
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Four decades before The Second Sex, de Beauvoir's 1909 birth in Paris occurred during the Belle Époque, a period when French women lacked voting rights and faced severe legal restrictions on property ownership and professional work.
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Beauvoir's 1943 philosophical essay Pyrrhus and Cineas argued that human freedom requires engaging with others' freedom, establishing key existentialist principles she would later develop.
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Between 1943 and 1986, de Beauvoir published 17 major philosophical and literary works, establishing herself as one of the twentieth century's most prolific intellectual figures.
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Over 50 years after its initial publication, The Second Sex has sold more than three million copies worldwide and remains continuously in print across dozens of languages.
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Beauvoir's 1944 novel She Came to Stay explored themes of jealousy and triangular relationships within her own circle, drawing heavily on her lived experiences with Sartre and his other partners.
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The Ethics of Ambiguity, published by de Beauvoir in 1947, offered a philosophical framework for human freedom grounded in existentialist ethics that preceded her more famous feminist work by two years.
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Her 1947 essay Existentialism and Humanism lecture, delivered alongside Sartre, established her as a leading voice in postwar French existentialist philosophy and intellectualism.
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Simone de Beauvoir taught philosophy at the Lycée Molière in Paris for nine years, from 1931 to 1943, before becoming a full-time writer and intellectual.
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A longtime smoker and coffee drinker, de Beauvoir died in 1986 at age 78 from pneumonia complicated by chronic lung disease.
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Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Simone de Beauvoir traveled extensively to Cuba, China, and the Soviet Union, documenting her observations in travel memoirs that reflected her commitment to socialist ideals.
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De Beauvoir won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1954 for her novel The Mandarins, making her the first woman to receive this major French literary award.
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Sartre and de Beauvoir maintained an open romantic relationship for 51 years until his death in 1980, rejecting traditional marriage while remaining philosophically and personally intertwined.
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In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, a 732-page treatise that became foundational to modern feminist theory and philosophy.