Simone de Beauvoir developed her philosophy of lived experience as she actually wrote fiction. Hence Beauvoir should be placed among major philosophical novelists of the twentieth-century like Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer, and Beauvoir's theory of the metaphysical novel acknowledges multicultural traditions of story-telling and song which are not locked into the theoretical abstractions of the Greek philosophical tradition. In Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience, Eleanore Holveck presents Simone de Beauvoir's theory of literature and metaphysics, including its relationship to the philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, with references to the literary tradition of Goethe, Maurice Barr s, Arthur Rimbaud, Andr Breton, and Paul Nizan. The book provides a detailed philosophical analysis of Beauvoir's early short stories and several major novels, including The Mandarins and L'invit e, from the point of view of "other" women who appear on the fringes of Beauvoir's fiction: shop girls, seamstresses, and prostitutes. Holveck applies Beauvoir's philosophy to her own lived experience as a working-class teenager who grew up in jazz clubs similar to those Beauvoir herself visited in New York and Chicago.

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.

While earlier research considered Simone de Beauvoir in the perspectives of Existentialism or Feminism, this work is the first to emphasize her reflective and descriptive approach and the full range of issues she addresses. There are valuable chapters and sections that are historical and/or comparative, but most of the contents of this work critically examine Beauvoir's views on old age (whereon she is the first phenomenologist to work), biology, gender, ethics, ethnicity (where she is among the first), and politics (again among the first). Besides their systematic as well as historical significance, these chapters show her philosophy as on a par with those of Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre in quality, richness and distinctiveness of problematics, and the penetration of her insight into collective as well as individual human life within the socio-historical world.

One of the most influential thinkers of her generation draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises in these three “immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion” (The Sunday Herald Times). Suffused with de Beauvoir’s remarkable insights into women, The Woman Destroyed gives us a legendary writer at her best. Includes "The Age of Discretion," "The Monologue," and "The Woman Destroyed." "Witty, immensely adroit...These three women are believable individuals presented with a wry mixture of sympathy and exasperation." —The Atlantic

Age and aging are pressing social-political issues. Yet, philosophers still have not paid sufficient attention to one of the major explorations of this topic, Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Coming of Age (1970). For much too long, it has been overshadowed by her other groundbreaking work, The Second Sex (1949). Now, for the first time, this volume focuses on Beauvoir's essay on old age and critically explores its significance from a phenomenological and feminist perspective. International Beauvoir scholars and renowned feminist phenomenologists from Europe and North America offer a unique look at one of the 20th century’s most outstanding existential-philosophical studies on age and aging. Thematically, the articles and short comments collected in this volume cover three main issues which are crucial with respect to an investigation of Beauvoir's study on age: gender, ethics, and time. The volume essentially contributes to Beauvoir studies, aging studies, cultural and gender studies, feminist theory, phenomenology, and existential philosophy.

Beauvoir in Time situates Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in the historical context of its writing and in later contexts of its international reception, from then till now. The book takes up three aspects of Beauvoir's work more recent feminists find embarrassing: "bad sex," "dated" views about lesbians, and intersections with race and class. Through close reading of Beauvoir's writing in many genres, alongside contemporaneous discourses (good and bad novels in French and English, outmoded psychoanalytic and sexological authorities, ethnographic surrealism, the writing of Richard Wright and Franz Fanon), and in light of her travels to the U.S. and China, the author uncovers insights more recent feminist methodologies obscure, showing that Beauvoir is still good to think with today.

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one”, Simone de Beauvoir A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short. Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the twentieth century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who 'applied' Sartre's ideas. In recent years new material has come to light revealing the ingenuity of Beauvoir's own philosophy and the importance of other lovers in her life. This ground-breaking biography draws on never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how Simone de Beauvoir became herself.