Teacher, philosopher, political activist, and writer; autobiographer, essayist, journalist, novelist, and playwright; atheist, existentialist, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir is one of the best-known French writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. The number of languages into which many of her books have been translated and the attention she received in the media during the last fifteen years of her life suggest that she may be the best-known woman writer of all times.

Simone de Beauvoir died in a Paris hospital of pneumonia on 14 April 1986. She was buried in the Montparnasse cemetery in the same grave with Jean-Paul Sartre's ashes. Five thousand men, women, and children attended the funeral. More than sixty bouquets and wreaths of flowers, sent by women's organizations around the world, decorated the tomb.

She was born in Paris in 1908 into an upper-middle-class but impoverished family whose religious and social values she rejected at an...