Simone de Beauvoir

Along with Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, and her longtime partner Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir was an originator of existentialism. At age twenty-one, she was the youngest student ever to earn an agrégation degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne in Paris. A prolific author, Beauvoir explored ethics, feminism, and politics in essays and books; she also wrote fiction and an autobiography. She received the prestigious French award for literature, the Prix Goncourt, for her novel The Mandarins (1954). Her best-known work, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex, 1949), is a foundational feminist text.