Simone de Beauvoir Timeline

Beauvoir published her first novel She Came to Stay in 1943, one of her most famous novels, drawing on her experiences with her circle of friends.

Image source: She Came to Stay

Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay on existentialist ethics titled Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944), marking her entry into formal philosophical publishing.

Sartre wrote the purpose of Les Temps Modernes in the Preface of the first issue published on 1 October 1945. From 1941 to 1946 Beauvoir helped found the journal and wrote some of her most important works including The Blood of Others (1945) and All Men are Mortal (1946).

Beauvoir defended her advocacy of Brasillach's execution in her 1946 essay 'An Eye for an Eye', engaging seriously with questions of punishment, justice, and revenge.

Post-war, Beauvoir began travels including North Africa to lecture, then made a long trip to the United States where she met Dolors Vanetti and kept a diary published in France in 1948 as America Day by Day.

Image source: America Day by Day

Beauvoir continued her exploration of existentialism through her second essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), following Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944).

The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe), first published in 1949, is a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. It turns the existentialist mantra that existence precedes essence into a feminist one: 'One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.' Betty Friedan said reading it in the early 1950s led her to her original analysis of women's existence.

Image source: The Second Sex

Chapters of The Second Sex were originally published in Les Temps Modernes beginning in June 1949, before the book's full publication later that year.

Published in 1954, The Mandarins won France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt. Written in 1954, Les Inséparables also describes her first love, Elisabeth Lacoin ('Zaza'), who died before age 22 of viral encephalitis.

Image source: The Mandarins

Her 1955 travels in China were the basis of her 1957 travelogue The Long March, in which she praised the efforts of the Chinese communists to emancipate women.

Image source: Long March

From 1958 to 1963, Beauvoir published her autobiography in three volumes, though a fourth volume would be released in 1974. Her memoirs, notably the first volume, Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée (1958), are considered her most enduring contribution to literature.

Image source: Simone de Beauvoir

In 1964 Beauvoir published a novella-length autobiography, A Very Easy Death, covering the time she spent visiting her aging mother, who was dying of cancer. She also wrote short stories including The Woman Destroyed, dealing with ageing.

Beauvoir would publish Misunderstanding in Moscow in 1967–68, coming at a time when she revoked her former support for the Soviets due to freedoms concerns.

Beauvoir wrote The Coming of Age in 1970, which offered a difficult account of aging and associated oppression in western capitalism.

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In 1981, she wrote La Cérémonie des adieux (A Farewell to Sartre), a painful account of Sartre's last years.

Image source: Jean-Paul Sartre

Beauvoir's early novel Les Inséparables, long suppressed, was published in French in 2020 and two different English translations in 2021, by Sandra Smith in the US and Lauren Elkin in the UK.

Image source: Les Inséparables

During the trial of Robert Brasillach in 1945, Beauvoir was among a small number of prominent intellectuals advocating for his execution for the 'intellectual crimes' of supporting Fascism and the genocide of Jewish people. After the war, Bianca would seek out Beauvoir, complaining of deep unhappiness, with her psychologist Jacques Lacan agreeing they had harmed her.

Image source: Robert Brasillach

In 1955 she published Les Temps Moderne in support of Algerian independence and three essays called Privileges questioning how the privileged can question their situation, stating the privileged must not be ignorant of hierarchies in order to address them.

She wrote and signed the Manifesto of the 343 in 1971, a manifesto that included a list of famous women who claimed to have had an abortion, then illegal in France. In 1974, abortion was legalized in France.

Beauvoir publicly declared herself a feminist in 1972 in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, at which point she joined other Marxist feminists in founding the Questions Féministes journal.

In 1982, François Mitterrand offered her the Legion of Honor, but she refused it, consistent with her lifelong anti-establishment principles.

Image source: Legion of Honour

She contributed the piece 'Feminism – Alive, Well, and in Constant Danger' to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan.

Image source: Sisterhood Is Global

Beauvoir received the 1975 Jerusalem Prize. In a 1975 interview with Betty Friedan about supporting a minimum wage for women who do housework, Beauvoir answered: 'No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice.'

Image source: Jerusalem Prize

Beauvoir received the 1978 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, adding to her international recognition alongside the Prix Goncourt and Jerusalem Prize.

Beauvoir died of pneumonia on 14 April 1986 in Paris, aged 78. Her legacy includes the journal Simone de Beauvoir Studies founded in 1983 and the International Simone de Beauvoir Society.

When Beauvoir's letters to Algren were published in 1997, it created an uproar about the truth of her memoirs.

Her play was stage read in 1999 in Chicago, reflecting renewed interest in her dramatic work.

Beauvoir published a series of letters Sartre sent to her and kept student-era diaries, not published in English until 2008, along with letters to Claude Lanzmann which were not available until 2018.

Only in 2009 was there a second translation of The Second Sex, to mark the 60th anniversary of the original publication.

Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier produced the first integral translation in 2010, reinstating a third of the original work.

In 2018, the manuscript pages of The Second Sex were published. There was also a new expanded edition of her biographies in France with additional letters and materials, including critiques of her belittlement next to Sartre.

In 2019, Time created 89 new covers to celebrate women of the year starting from 1920; it chose Beauvoir for 1949.

Image source: Time (magazine)