Beauvoir’s philosophy reached English readers years before Sartre’s did.

Evidence

At that time, appreciation of her powers of original and independent thought was especially strong in France, where aft er the Liberation in 1944, Beauvoir’s philosophical essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas had been rushed into print. She wrote this book in direct opposition to Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of freedom. Her book was received with great enthusiasm and became, no less than Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a primary vehicle for the introduction of existentialist thought to French intellectual life. … In 1947 she traveled to the United States, where her reputation as an important new French philosopher had preceded her. Indeed, American universities eagerly opened their doors to her. In a period of three months, Beauvoir lectured on philosophy at twenty-three of America’s leading institutions, including Harvard, Vassar, Yale, Princeton, and Berkeley. Th at same year she published Th e Ethics of Ambiguity. Th is book was immediately translated into English and ran through several printing runs. By contrast, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was not available to English readers until eight years later. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 304

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the 1949 post-Second-Sex eclipse of Beauvoir’s standing actually unfold — and who engineered it?
• SEED: A revisionist essay angle: Beauvoir was the more famous existentialist export to America before Sartre; the influence narrative is partly a post-1949 construction.
• XREF: connects to: Beauvoir’s philosophical essays reached English readers only recently — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 28