A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren - Softcover

Beauvoir, Simone De; Algren, Nelson; Le Bon De Beauvoir, Sylvie; Kling, Vanessa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565845609 ISBN 13: 9781565845602

Publisher: The New Press, 1999

Synopsis

In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir met Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Nelson Algren in Chicago, and it was love at first sight. A passionate affair ensued, spanning twenty years and four continents in an era when a transatlantic flight took twenty-four hours and overseas telephone calls were a luxury. A Transatlantic Love Affair collects more than three hundred love letters written in English by de Beauvoir to Algren.

Unique among the prolific correspondence de Beauvoir conducted throughout her life, these letters involved someone not at all of her world. De Beauvoir was forced to explain to Algren everything that usually went without saying: her background, her life in Paris, and the political situation in Paris. The result is a cross between a personal memoir and an insider’s intellectual history of Left Bank life in postwar Paris, populated with luminaries including Albert Camus, Truman Capote, Colette, Alberto Giacometti, Margaret Mead, and Richard Wright.

Written as she was working on The Mandarins, America Day by Day, and The Second Sex, the letters provide a new backdrop for those now classic works. Recently on the bestseller list in France, these frank, tender, and often humorous letters reveal an unusual portrait of the “Second Simone.”

About this title

Review:

Simone de Beauvoir met Nelson Algren in Chicago in February 1947, when a mutual friend arranged for him to serve as her tour guide for two days. The attraction was immediate, and within two months they were in love. Because Algren was so alien to de Beauvoir's world, she spent time describing events and people to him she might otherwise have taken for granted. The result is that de Beauvoir's 300 surviving letters to Algren are unusually rich in detail--love letters with a conscious undercurrent of French social history. Translated and annotated by Kate Leblanc, they offer amusing insights into postwar Parisian life and characters, delivered with the charm of the nonnative writer.

In one letter, de Beauvoir sums up Albert Camus as "an interesting but difficult guy. When he was not pleased with the book he was writing, he was very arrogant; now, he has got a rather great success and he has become very modest and sincere." She coolly describes a dinner party where she witnessed the separation of the apexes of mind and body: "Sartre was alone in a corner, eating sadly some corned-beef, and I sat in front of Rita Hayworth, trying to speak to her, and looking at her beautiful shoulders and breasts which could have made so many men crazy but which were so useless for me." This is essential reading for devotees of the Paris literary scene and other literary romantics. --Regina Marler

About the Author:

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) is best known for her existentialist and feminist writing, including The Second Sex, The Mandarins (winner of the Prix Goncourt), The Coming of Age, and America Day by Day. Editor of the monthly Paris review Les Temps Modernes with her lifelong companion, writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, she met Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Nelson Algren (1909-1981), author of Never Come Morning, The Man With the Golden Arm (winner of the National Book Award), The Neon Wilderness, and A Walk on the Wild Side, in Chicago in 1947.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1565845609
• ISBN 13: 9781565845602
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 560
• Editor: Reeves Ellen Gordon