Simone de Beauvoir

Born on January 9, 1908, in Paris, into a bourgeois Catholic family that lost its fortune when she was a child, Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir decided early that she would become a writer. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and in 1929 passed the agregation in philosophy, the youngest person ever to do so, finishing second to Jean-Paul Sartre, who finished first. The two began a lifelong intellectual and romantic partnership that became the most celebrated in modern letters, built on a pact of "essential" love between them alongside "contingent" loves with others. Her novel She Came to Stay (1943) explored the existentialist themes of freedom and the gaze of the other. The Mandarins (1954), a roman a clef about the postwar Parisian intellectual scene including her affair with the American writer Nelson Algren, won the Prix Goncourt. But her most consequential work was The Second Sex (1949), which argued that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman", a sentence that became the founding statement of modern feminism. She also produced four volumes of autobiography that constitute one of the great self-examinations of the twentieth century. She traveled widely, championed Algerian independence, signed the Manifesto of the 343 admitting to having had an abortion, and remained intellectually active until the end. She died on April 14, 1986, in Paris, and was buried beside Sartre in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse.

When The Second Sex reached the shops in 1949 it sold twenty-two thousand copies in its first week and enraged the men who reviewed it. Albert Camus, her friend, told her she had made the French male look ridiculous. One academic she knew stopped reading and hurled the book across the room.