Books

Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1956. Signed limited edition and first English edition of the novel for which de Beauvoir won the Prix Goncourt, awarded to the best and most imaginative prose work. Octavo, original cloth. Boldly signed by Simone de Beauvoir. Fine in a near fine dust original glassine jacket in the original slipcase. Translated from the French by Leonard M. Friedman. Rare in this condition. In her most famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. Hailed by Iris Murdoch as "a remarkable book, a novel on the grand scale, courageous in its exactitude and endearing because of its persistent seriousness." In fictionally relating the stories of those around her ― Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Nelson Algren ― de Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time. At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political…