America Day by Day

A great living document of America in the forties * Scotsman *Her travel diary records with fresh, hungry, sensuous curiosity the cultural climate of postwar America just before the Cold War closed down. No writer could be better company in that complex, vanished world than Simone de Beauvoir – Diane MiddlebrookSimone de Beauvoir in New York City in 1947: Like all Europeans she begins to lament the obvious the hard edges, the crude self-involvement, the absence of café life and then suddenly she gives herself up to the aloneness of the city with a responsiveness astonishing for the brilliance it generates. Fifty years later it is still exciting to be in her company as she discovers unexpected love for the capital of the new world. – Vivian GornickFor women, and men, who want to experience vicariously Jack Kerouac’s open road with less macho romanticism and more existential savvy, America Day by Day, hidden from us for nearly 50 years, comes to the reader like a dusty bottle of Vintage French cognac, asking only to be uncorked * New York Times Book Review *

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agregation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught at the lycees at Marseille and Rouen from 1931-1937, and in Paris from 1938-1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movement, working with Sartre on Les Temps Mordernes. The author of several books including The Mandarins (1957) which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, de Beauvoir was one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died in 1986.