America Day by Day

By: Simone de Beauvoir

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Paperback | 12 August 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
416 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.6 x 12.9 x 2.5

Paperback

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Intimate, warm, and compulsively readable, this is Simone de Beauvoir's captivating account of her road trip across America in 1947.

In 1947 Simone de Beauvoir took a road trip across America.

She travelled from coast to coast, from New York to Hollywood, taking in New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Washington DC. She rode a pony through the Grand Canyon, listened to jazz in New Orleans and visited the nightclubs of Chicago. And she captured the entire experience in her journal.

This captivating book is that journal and an immersive portrait of postwar America. Beauvoir was disturbed by the poverty and segregation she encountered and at the same time delighted by American energy and friendliness.

Intimate, warm, and compulsively readable, this is travel writing from the iconic feminist and thinker, Simone de Beauvoir.

On New York- 'I walk between the steep cliffs at the bottom of a canyon where no sun penetrates- it's permeated by a salt smell. Human history is not inscribed on these carefully calibrated buildings- They are closer to prehistoric caves than to the houses of Paris or Rome.'

On Los Angeles- 'I watch the Mexican dances and eat chilli con carne, which takes the roof off my mouth, I drink the tequila and I'm utterly dazed with pleasure.'

About the Author

Simone de Beauvoir (Author)Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agregation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught at the lycees at Marseille and Rouen from 1931-1937, and in Paris from 1938-1943. After the war, she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movement, working with Sartre on Les Temps Mordernes. The author of several books including The Mandarins (1957) which was awarded the Prix Goncourt, de Beauvoir was one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died in 1986.

Industry Reviews

Her travel diary records with fresh, hungry, sensuous curiosity the cultural climate of postwar America just before the Cold War closed down. No writer could be better company in that complex, vanished world than Simone de Beauvoir -- Diane Middlebrook

Simone de Beauvoir in New York City in 1947: Like all Europeans she begins to lament the obvious the hard edges, the crude self-involvement, the absence of café life and then suddenly she gives herself up to the aloneness of the city with a responsiveness astonishing for the brilliance it generates. Fifty years later it is still exciting to be in her company as she discovers unexpected love for the capital of the new world. -- Vivian Gornick

A great living document of America in the forties -- Scotsman

For women, and men, who want to experience vicariously Jack Kerouac's open road with less macho romanticism and more existential savvy, America Day by Day, hidden from us for nearly 50 years, comes to the reader like a dusty bottle of Vintage French cognac, asking only to be uncorked -- New York Times Book Review

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