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In 1929 Simone de Beauvoir, then 21, sat the agrégation, France’s competitive exam for philosophy teachers, and came second. First place went to Jean-Paul Sartre, who was taking it for the second time; she was the youngest candidate to pass. She taught in lycées in Marseille, Rouen and Paris until 1943, the year her first novel appeared. Six years later The Second Sex sold 20,000 copies in its first week, and the Vatican put it on its Index of prohibited books. She went on to win the Prix Goncourt, write four volumes of autobiography and edit Les Temps modernes until her death in 1986. This guide covers her 14 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 14 key books · 1943–2020 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Simone de Beauvoir’s best-known book is The Second Sex (1949), followed by The Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Goncourt, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) and A Very Easy Death (1964). Start with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the first volume of her autobiography. Below are all 14 key books in order, with the years of the French first editions.
Where to Start with Simone de Beauvoir
If you want her life in her own words
→ Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) — her childhood and student years, up to meeting Sartre.
If you want the book everyone means
→ The Second Sex (1949) — the 1949 study of what it means to be a woman.
If you want a novel
→ The Mandarins (1954) — post-war Paris intellectuals, and the Prix Goncourt.
If you want something short
→ A Very Easy Death (1964) — the last weeks of her mother’s life.
14 Simone de Beauvoir Books, in Order
She Came to Stay
Her first published novel, L’Invitée. In Paris on the eve of the Second World War, Françoise and Pierre live an open relationship that strains when they form a trio with Françoise’s younger friend Xavière. It is a fictional version of Beauvoir and Sartre’s relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and her sister Wanda, and works out the existentialist themes of freedom and “the other”; it ends with Françoise killing Xavière.
The Blood of Others
Written from 1941 under the German occupation. Jean Blomart sits through one night at the bedside of his lover Hélène, who has been shot on a Resistance mission, and looks back on how they met, his break with his middle-class family and her path from indifference to resistance. The question running through it is responsibility for what happens to others. Claude Chabrol filmed it in 1984 with Jodie Foster.
All Men Are Mortal
In 1930s France, Régine, a vain and successful actress, meets Raimon Fosca, an Italian who says he is immortal. He tells her his story: born in a 13th-century Italian city-state, he drank a potion of immortality and lived through centuries of wars, served the Habsburgs and went to the Americas, only to find that a life without end empties every project of meaning. It was filmed in 1995.
The Ethics of Ambiguity
Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté, first published in Les Temps modernes. Her answer to the charge that existentialism cannot ground an ethics: human beings are ambiguous, both free and bound to a body and a situation, and there is no God or absolute to settle what is right. She sketches the ways people dodge their freedom, from the “serious man” to the nihilist, and argues that willing one’s own freedom means willing the freedom of others.
The Second Sex
Le Deuxième Sexe, published in two volumes in June and November 1949. The first examines what biology, psychoanalysis, history and myth have said about women; the second describes women’s lived experience from childhood to old age. Her central claim is that woman has been made man’s Other. It sold 20,000 copies in its first week, was placed on the Vatican’s Index, and has been translated into some forty languages. The first English version (H. M. Parshley, 1953) cut much of the text; a complete translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier followed in 2009–2010.
The Mandarins
Left-wing intellectuals in Paris, from the end of the war to the mid-1950s, argue over communism and what writers owe to politics. The newspaper editor Henri Perron and the writer Robert Dubreuilh are often read as Camus and Sartre, which Beauvoir denied; Robert’s wife Anne, a psychoanalyst, has an affair with the American writer Lewis Brogan, modelled on Nelson Algren, to whom the book is dedicated. It won the Prix Goncourt in 1954.
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
The first of her four volumes of autobiography, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, covering 1908 to 1929. She describes a Catholic bourgeois childhood in Paris, her family’s loss of money, losing her faith as a teenager, her studies at the Sorbonne, her friendship with Elisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, who died young, and meeting Sartre in 1929.
The Prime of Life
The second volume of the autobiography, La Force de lâge, from 1929 to the Liberation of Paris in 1944: her years teaching in Marseille, Rouen and Paris, her life with Sartre and their circle, the trio with Olga Kosakiewicz behind She Came to Stay, and the war and occupation.
Force of Circumstance
The third volume, La Force des choses, from the Liberation to the end of the Algerian war in 1962: the fame of existentialism, Les Temps modernes, her travels to the United States and her relationship with Nelson Algren, her years with Claude Lanzmann, and her campaigning against French torture in Algeria.
A Very Easy Death
In autumn 1963 her mother, Françoise de Beauvoir, broke her femur in a fall, and doctors found terminal cancer. This short book, Une mort très douce, follows the weeks in the clinic: the diagnosis that Simone and her sister Hélène kept from their mother, an operation she later doubted, and her mother’s death. Sartre considered it her best work.
The Woman Destroyed
Three stories about women in crisis: an intellectual woman in her sixties facing old age and a break with her son (“The Age of Discretion”), a mother’s furious monologue after her daughter’s suicide (“Monologue”), and the diary of Monique, whose husband has an affair (“The Woman Destroyed”). The title story was serialised in Elle in 1967; critics were dismissive, and Beauvoir was surprised how many readers took Monique’s side.
The Coming of Age
La Vieillesse, published in Britain as Old Age. Built like The Second Sex, it first surveys what biology, anthropology and history say about old age, then how old people experience it, with examples from Freud to Victor Hugo. She argues that society treats the old as outsiders and keeps a “conspiracy of silence” about them. It is now counted among the founding texts of age studies.
Adieux
La Cérémonie des adieux, published the year after Sartre died in April 1980. The first part is her account of his last ten years, 1970 to 1980, drawn from her diary, including his failing health and near-blindness. The second and longer part is a series of conversations recorded in 1974, in which Sartre talks about his childhood, his books, his friendships and quarrels, money, sex and God.
Inseparable
Written in 1954 and published in French in 2020 as Les Inséparables. Sylvie tells the story of her friendship with Andrée, from their first meeting at school, as Andrée struggles with the demands of her large Catholic family. Andrée is based on Zaza Lacoin. Sartre dismissed the manuscript and it stayed unpublished in her lifetime. Two English translations appeared in 2021, one by Sandra Smith with an introduction by Margaret Atwood, one by Lauren Elkin as The Inseparables.
In What Order to Read Simone de Beauvoir
There are no series to keep in order, apart from the autobiography: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance and All Said and Done (1972) follow her life from 1908 to the early 1970s and are best read in that order. A Very Easy Death and Adieux sit beside them, about her mother and about Sartre.
The novels and essays talk to each other. She Came to Stay fictionalises years she later tells straight in The Prime of Life; The Mandarins covers the same post-war world as Force of Circumstance; and Inseparable retells the friendship with Zaza from the first memoir. Reading a novel next to the matching memoir shows how she turned her own life into fiction.
A reading path
1. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
2. A Very Easy Death (1964)
3. The Second Sex (1949)
4. The Mandarins (1954)
5. The Coming of Age (1970)
Everything Else Simone de Beauvoir Published
Beyond the 14 key books: 9 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Essays, travel writing and a play
6
6 books · 1944–1962
- 1944Pyrrhus and Cinéasher first philosophical essay, on action and other people
- 1945Who Shall Die?Les Bouches inutiles, her only play
- 1948America Day by Daya diary of her four months in the United States in 1947
- 1955Must We Burn Sade?essays first collected as Privilèges
- 1957The Long Marchon China, after her 1955 visit with Sartre
- 1962Djamila Boupachawith Gisèle Halimi, on an Algerian woman tortured by French soldiers
Fiction and the last memoir
3
3 books · 1966–1979
- 1966Les Belles Imagesher last novel published in her lifetime
- 1972All Said and Donethe fourth and last volume of her autobiography
- 1979When Things of the Spirit Come Firstearly stories written in the 1930s and published forty years later
The years · 1908–1986
Quick facts about Simone de Beauvoir
- Known for
- Arguing in The Second Sex (1949) that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”, a founding claim of modern feminism, and for her four-volume autobiography.
- 1908
- Born in Paris
- 1929
- Second in the philosophy agrégation, behind Sartre
- 1949
- The Second Sex
- 1954
- Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins
- 1971
- Signs the Manifesto of the 343
- 1986
- Dies in Paris, aged 78
- Born
- 9 January 1908, Paris, into a Catholic bourgeois family
- Education
- Philosophy at the Sorbonne; agrégation in 1929, placed second
- Worked
- Lycée teacher in Marseille, Rouen and Paris until 1943
- Edited
- Les Temps modernes, co-founded with Sartre in 1945, until her death
- Honours
- Prix Goncourt (1954), Jerusalem Prize (1975), Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1978)
- Died
- 14 April 1986, Paris; buried beside Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery
The red mark is 1949: The Second Sex, her study of how women have been made the “Other”.
How Simone de Beauvoir Writes: Philosophy Through Lived Experience
Beauvoir did philosophy in novels as well as essays; she called the form the “metaphysical novel”. She Came to Stay turns the problem of other minds into a jealous trio, All Men Are Mortal tests what a project means to someone who cannot die, and The Blood of Others puts the responsibility she theorised in Pyrrhus and Cinéas into the Resistance.
Her big essays are built from concrete material. The Second Sex moves from biology, psychoanalysis and history to page after page of lived experience, from girlhood to marriage, motherhood and old age, and The Coming of Age repeats the method for old people, using biology, history and the lives of writers. The argument comes out of the description rather than ahead of it.
Most of all she wrote from her own life. The novels borrow from it, and four volumes of autobiography, plus books on her mother’s death and Sartre’s last years, record French intellectual life from the 1930s to the 1970s. Diaries and letters published after her death sometimes complicate the story the memoirs tell, which is why scholars now read them side by side.
Watch
Simone de Beauvoir on Radio-Canada, 1959
Ten years after The Second Sex, Beauvoir talks in French with a Radio-Canada interviewer about existentialism, philosophy and political commitment, and the situation of women.
Frequently asked questions about Simone de Beauvoir’s books
How many books has Simone de Beauvoir written?
This page lists 23: the 14 key books, plus 9 more in the bibliography, among them her only play, her travel books on America and China and the last volume of her autobiography, All Said and Done (1972). Her diaries and her letters to Sartre and to Nelson Algren were published after her death.
What are Simone de Beauvoir’s books in order?
Her key books in order of French publication: She Came to Stay (1943), The Blood of Others (1945), All Men Are Mortal (1946), The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), The Second Sex (1949), The Mandarins (1954), Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstance (1963), A Very Easy Death (1964), The Woman Destroyed (1967), The Coming of Age (1970), Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981) and Inseparable (written 1954, published 2020).
Where should I start with Simone de Beauvoir?
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), the first volume of her autobiography: it is readable, short compared with The Second Sex, and shows where her ideas came from. If you want the shortest way in, read A Very Easy Death; if you want fiction, The Mandarins.
What is Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous book?
The Second Sex (1949), her study of how women have been defined as the “Other” of men. It sold 20,000 copies in its first week in France and has been translated into some forty languages. Her best-known novel is The Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954.
What does “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” mean?
The sentence opens the second volume of The Second Sex. Beauvoir argues that what society calls “feminine” is not fixed by nature but produced by upbringing, custom and the expectations of others, and the second volume follows that process from childhood to old age.
Which translation of The Second Sex should I read?
The first English translation, by the biology professor H. M. Parshley (1953), cut and simplified a large part of the text. The 2009–2010 translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier is complete and is the one most readers now use.
Were Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre married?
No. They met in 1929 while preparing for the agrégation and agreed on a lasting partnership that allowed other relationships, which both had; hers included the American novelist Nelson Algren. They never married. When Beauvoir died in 1986 she was buried beside Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery.
Why is Simone de Beauvoir controversial?
Two episodes are often raised. After a complaint by the mother of a former pupil, Nathalie Sorokine, about Beauvoir’s relationship with her daughter, Beauvoir was suspended from teaching in June 1943; she was reinstated after the Liberation in 1945 but never taught again. In 1977 she was among the signatories of two open letters on the age of consent: one published in Le Monde in January, defending three men held in pre-trial detention on charges of sexual offences against 12- and 13-year-olds, and one sent in May to the commission revising the penal code.
Which Simone de Beauvoir books have been made into films?
The Blood of Others was filmed by Claude Chabrol in 1984, with Jodie Foster, and All Men Are Mortal was filmed in 1995. Beauvoir herself appeared in a film portrait made by Josée Dayan and Malka Ribowska in 1979.
What prizes did Simone de Beauvoir win?
The Prix Goncourt in 1954 for The Mandarins, the Jerusalem Prize in 1975 and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1978.
Footnotes
- Simone de Beauvoir — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Simone de Beauvoir — Encyclopædia Britannica
- The Mandarins — Wikipedia
- The Second Sex — Penguin Books
- French petitions against age-of-consent laws — Wikipedia
- Simone de Beauvoir: chronology — University of British Columbia
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all hers.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949), in H. M. Parshley’s translation
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