Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer, philosopher and social critic whose fiction gave narrative form to the existentialist ideas she developed as Jean-Paul Sartre's lifelong intellectual partner. Her 1949 study The Second Sex, a sweeping philosophical and historical examination of women's situation under the claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, became a founding text of second wave feminism and remains her most influential work. Her 1954 novel The Mandarins, a roman a clef following French left wing intellectuals in the years after the Second World War, won the Prix Goncourt, France's leading literary prize. She also wrote extensively in memoir, including Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, and in shorter fiction, including She Came to Stay. Long read as secondary to Sartre's philosophy, her own contribution to existentialist ethics and to the philosophy of gender is now widely recognized by scholars as original in its own right.