Adieux : A farewell to Sartre.

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris (above the Cafe de la Rotonde in Montparnasse) in 1908. Her father was a lawyer of conservative views. She took a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1929 and was placed second to jean-Paul Sartre, who became her firm friend. She taught in the Iyeees at Marseilles and Rouen from 1931 to 1937, and from 1938 to 1943 was teaching in Paris. After the war she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movement. Her first novel, L'Lnvitee, was published in 1943, and in an essay, Pyrrhus et Cineas, published in the following year, she developed some of the major themes of existentialism. Le San,!! desautres appeared in 1945, when she also had a play, Les Bouches inutiles, presented at the Theatre des Carrefours. There followed Tous les hommes sont mortels and Pour une morale de /'ambi,!!uite in 1947. Two years later she published her famous two-volume study of
women, The Second Sex, and in 1954 won the Prix Goncourt with her novel, The Mandarins. Since then she has written The Lon,!! March
(1958), Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1959), Djamila Boupacha (with Gisele Halimi), The Prime of Life (1963), Force of Circumstance (1965). A Very Easy Death (1966), The Woman Destroyed (1969), Old A,!!e (1972), All Said and Done (1974) and When Things of the Spirit Come First (1982). Many of these book sare published in Penguin. In 1978 she was awarded the Austrian State Prize for her contribution to European literature. Simone de Beauvoir has travelled widely in Europe and America.