The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir (1908‐1986) is regarded as one of the most important and interesting French existentialist writers and philosophers. Work on existentialism itself is widely known, and other major figures in existentialism, like Sartre and Camus and Merleau‐Ponty, have been extensively documented and analyzed. Simone de Beauvoir in the popular imagination has taken on the status of an icon in the feminist tradition, largely because of her book The Second Sex (de Beauvoir, 1949), placed at that time on the Catholic Index and the focus of varied debate ever since. Yet her place and contribution, not just in and to...