Simone de Beauvoir

The Mandarins is a 1954 roman à clef by Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir was awarded the Prix Goncourt prize in 1954 for The Mandarins. It was first published in English in 1956. The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French intellectuals from the end of World War II to the mid fifties. The title …

The Ethics of Ambiguity is Simone de Beauvoir's second major non-fiction work. It was prompted by a lecture she gave in 1945, after which she claimed that it was impossible to base an ethical system on her partner Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical work Being and Nothingness. The following year, over a six-month …