Sartre and Beauvoir contemplated exile rather than flee to the United States.

Evidence

Over dinner with Jacques-Laurent Bost, Olga Kosakiewicz and Richard Wright — the latter now living in Paris — Beauvoir and Sartre again discussed the subject: ‘how to get away, where, when?’ Nelson Algren had written offering to help them get into the United States, but they did not want this. If they had to leave France, it should be for a neutral country. Perhaps, Beauvoir wrote, they would go to Brazil, where the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig had found refuge during the last war. But Zweig had committed suicide there, unable to endure exile. And this time it would be to flee socialism! How could this be happening? — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 799

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The irony — fleeing to escape socialism, unlike the fascism that drove Zweig — and the specter of forced exile and the co-option of one’s name by the regime is richly literary raw material.