 Simone de Beauvoir was born on January 9, 1908. She died seventy-eight years later, on April 14, 1986. At the time of her death she was honored as a crucial figure in the struggle for women’s rights, and as an eminent writer, having won the Prix Goncourt, the prestigious French literary award, for her novel The Mandarins (1954). She was also famous for being the life-long companion of Jean Paul Sartre. Active in the French intellectual scene all of her life, and a central player in the philosophical debates of the times both in her role as an author of philosophical essays, novels, plays, memoirs, travel diaries, and newspaper articles, and as an editor of Les Temps Modernes, Beauvoir was not considered a philosopher in her own right at the time of her death. 