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Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
HarperCollins
October 2005
Featuring: Simone de Beauvoir; Jean-Paul Sartre
432 pages ISBN: 0060520590 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
They are one of the world's legendary couples. We can't
think of one without thinking of the other. Simone de
Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre -- those passionate,
freethinking existentialist philosopher-writers -- had a
committed but notoriously open union that generated no end
of controversy. With Tête-a-Tête, distinguished biographer
Hazel Rowley offers the first dual portrait of these two
colossal figures and their intense, often embattled
relationship. Through original interviews and access to new
primary sources, Rowley portrays them up close, in their
most intimate moments. We witness Beauvoir and Sartre with their circle, holding
court in Paris cafés. We learn the details of their
infamous romantic entanglements with the young Olga
Kosakiewicz and others; of their efforts to protest the
wars in Algeria and Vietnam; and of Beauvoir's tempestuous
love affair with Nelson Algren. We follow along on their
many travels, involving meetings with dignitaries such as
Roosevelt, Khrushchev, and Castro. We listen in on the
couple's conversations about Sartre's Nausea, Being and
Nothingness, and Words, and Beauvoir's The Second Sex, The
Mandarins, and her memoirs. And we hear the anguished
discussions that led Sartre to refuse the Nobel Prize. The impact of their writings on modern thought cannot be
overestimated, but Beauvoir and Sartre are remembered just
as much for the lives they led. They were brilliant,
courageous, profoundly innovative individuals, and Tête-à-
Tête shows the passion, energy, daring, humor, and
contradictions of their remarkable, unorthodox
relationship. Theirs is a great story -- and a great story
is precisely what Beauvoir and Sartre most wanted their
lives to be.
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