Simone de Beauvoir, Diary of a Philosophy Student: Vol 1, 1926-27, Trans. Barbara Klaw, Ed, Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmerman. Notes and Annotations by Barbara Klaw. Transcribed from the French by Barbara Klaw and Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 344 pages. Cloth $40 ISBN 0-252-03142-3.

This is the culmination of over ten years of detailed work in France and the United States by Barbara Klaw.

Revelatory insights into the early life and thought of the preeminent French feminist philosopher:

"This is a magnificent piece of work. It is an engaging read and lets English readers to whom French is not accessible have first-hand access to some now much-discussed evidence regarding the independence of Beauvoir's thought. The translation is beautiful, smooth, and true. A real coup!"
--Claudia Card, Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin

"This book is an enormously significant event which scholars have been eagerly awaiting for quite some time. Study of Beauvoir's diaries not only alerts us to fascinating and unknown influences on her intellectual and personal development, but it could also form the basis for an amazing study of how the raw material of adolescent emotion, all its masochism and its narcissism, became transmuted into the readable and beautiful texts from which we can all learn so much."
--Meryl Altman, director of Women's Studies, DePauw University

Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. Written years before her first meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, these diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and offer critical insights into her early philosophy and literary works. Presented here for the first time in translation and fully annotated, the diary is completed by introductions addressing its philosophical, historical and literary significance, and represents an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir's independent thinking and influence on the world.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French existentialist philosopher who employed a literary-philosophical method in her essays, including Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, as well as in her novels, play, and multi-volume autobiography.