Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

This is a biography of de Beauvoir and Sartre that draws strongly on newly available journals and letters written by the couple, as well as on long-established sources. By carefully tracing the dates of composition of some of de Beauvoir's and Sartre's key works, it demonstrates the previously unrecognized part that de Beauvoir played in the development of the ideas long claimed as Sartre's alone in "Being and Nothingness" and other early works. This discovery is at the heart of the Fullbrooks' account of de Beauvoir's and Sartre's childhoods, and their first 20 years together as a couple who changed the intellectual outlook of the world. Original documentary evidence also supports a revisionary account of the couple's intimate lives, whose radical sexual freedom, the authors argue, mmust now be understood as stemming from de Beauvoir's rather than Sartre's personal needs. This text aims to provide insights into the lives, literature and and ideas of two major figures on the modern cultural scene, and raises questions as to the psychological needs, sexual politics and bad faith that led de Beauvoir and Sartre to give false accounts of the inner workings of their relationship.