A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s. She vividly evokes her friendships love interests mentors and the early days of the most important relationship of her life with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre against the backdrop of a turbulent time in France politically.
