Simone De Beauvoir

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“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me” –Simone De Beauvoir “There are some thinkers who are, from the very beginning, unambiguously identified as philosophers. There are others whose philosophical place is forever contested and there are those who have gradually won the right to be admitted into the philosophical fold. Simone de Beauvoir is one of these belatedly acknowledged philosophers” (Debra Bergoffen). Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908 in Paris, France to Georges Bertrand De Beauvoir and Françoise (née) Brasseur. Beauvoir had been a deeply religious child as a result of her education and her mother’s training. At the age of 14 she had a crisis of faith and decided definitively that there was no God. Simone remained an atheist until her death on April 14, 1986. Simone was never married, and she had only once considered marriage with her cousin, Jacques Champigneulle. Instead she preferred to live the life of an intellectual. Beauvoir often makes the claim that although her passion for philosophy was lifelong, her heart was always set on becoming an author of great literature. She succeeded in writing some of the best existentialist literature of the 20th century. Existentialism’s concern for the individual thrown into an absurd world and forced to act, lends itself well to the artistic medium of fiction. All of Beauvoir’s novels incorporate existentialist themes, problems, and questions in her attempt to describe the human situation in times of personal turmoil, political upheaval, and social unrest. Simone De Beauvoir’s novels consist of: Her first novel L’Invitée (She Came to stay) was published in 1943. The book is a complex psychological study of the battles waged for selfhood. Set up during the buildup to World War II, it charts the
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