"This indispensable volume offers a panorama of Beauvoir's intellectual preoccupations. The translators and editors are to be applauded for producing such a valuable contribution to Beauvoir studies."-- French Studies "An admirable example of careful translating and editing. The diary presents an opportunity for opening an avenue of Beauvorian scholarship in aesthetics."-- APA Newsletter "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, author of The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir "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, DePauw University.