A Very Easy Death
By (Author) Simone de Beauvoir
Introduction by Ali Smith
Translated by Patrick O'Brian
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Fitzcarraldo Editions
19th September 2023
28th June 2023
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Memoirs
Sociology: death and dying
848.91409
Paperback
114
Width 121mm, Height 197mm
A Very Easy Death has long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother's death 'shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence' (Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.
'The mother of 20th-century feminism.' - Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books
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, and The Second Sex, a foundational book for contemporary feminism, de Beauvoir was one of the most influential philosophers and novelists of her generation. She died in 1986.