America Day by Day - Softcover

Simone De Beauvoir

4.03

468 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753808595 ISBN 13: 9780753808597

Publisher: Phoenix Paperbacks, 1999

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De Beauvoir travelled intrepidly from New York to Washington, San Francisco to Las Vegas, Chicago (where she met Nelson Algren) to New Orleans and the Deep South. Her account is packed with beautiful descriptions and penetrating observations about postwar American culture, food, and landscape - some of historical interest, some, which ring just as true today. De Beauvoir loved exploring the seamier side of cities - visiting drug dens in Chicago, smoking poet a bohemian parties in New York. She was shocked by the vast gulf between rich and proof everywhere in the country, and by segregation in the Deep South. "America Day by Day" is classic travel writing - vivid, personal, and inquisitive.

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From the Back Cover:

"The author of this ravishing book is the novelist in Simone de Beauvoir at thirty-something. 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 Middlebrook

"Simone de Beauvoir in NY in 1947: Like all Europeans she begins to lament the obvious--the hard edges, the crude self-involvement, the absence of cafe 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 Gornick

About the Author:

Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in 1908. She was a French writer and feminist, a member of the intellectual fellowship of philosopher-writers who have given a literary transcription to the themes of Existentialism. She is known primarily for her treatise Le Deuxieme Sexe, 2 vol (The Second Sex) a scholarly and passionate plea for the abolition of what she called the myth of the 'eternal feminine.' This seminal work became a classic of feminist literature. Schooled in private institutions, de Beauvoir attended the Sorbonne, where, in 1929, she passed her agregation in philosophy and met Jean-Paul Sartre, beginning a lifelong association with him. Her novels expound the major Existential themes, demonstrating her conception of the writer's commitment to the times, in addition to treating feminist issues, de Beauvoir was concerned with the issue of ageing, which she addressed in Une Mort tres douce (1964; A Very Easy Death). She died in 1986.

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