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Article: de BEAUVOIR // `Monster,' `priestess' and `mother of us all'
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- April 1, 1990
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright (null) Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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Simone de Beauvoir A Biography. By Deirdre Bair.
Summit. $24.95.
In her time, Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher,
novelist and feminist, was called many things. Not all of them were
polite.
To her friends, she was Castor (or "beaver," in French), because
she was such a ferocious workaholic. To others, in whose eyes she
never quite transcended her role as Jean-Paul Sartre's tireless
consort and confidante, she was mockingly referred to as the "high
priestess of existentialism."
For Chicago writer Nelson Algren, with whom she had a long and
often embattled love affair, de Beauvoir was "my little Frog wife,"
although she never married him, or anyone else. And to her
detractors - ...