America day by day
By: Simone de Beauvoir ; translated by Carol Cosman ; foreword by Douglas Brinkley.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 390
Subjects: Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908- -- Travel -- United States.; Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908- -- Diaries.; United States -- Description and travel.; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1945-1970.; United States -- Social conditions -- 1945-
Genres: Diaries.
Description: Here is the ultimate American road book, one with a perspective unlike that of any other. In January 1947 Simone de Beauvoir landed at LaGuardia airport and began a four-month journey that took her from one coast of the United States to the other, and back again.

Embraced by the Conde Nast set in a swirl of cocktail parties in New York, where she was hailed as the "prettiest existentialist" by Janet Flanner in the New Yorker, Beauvoir traveled west by car, train, and Greyhound, immersing herself in the nation's culture, customs, people, and landscape. The detailed diary she kept of the trip became America Day by Day, published in France in 1948 and offered here in a completely new translation.

It is one of the most intimate, warm, and compulsively readable texts from the great writer's pen. Fascinating pages are devoted to Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and San Antonio. We see Beauvoir gambling in a Reno casino, smoking her first marijuana cigarette in the Plaza Hotel, donning raingear to view Niagara Falls, lecturing at Vassar College, and learning firsthand about the Chicago underworld of morphine addicts and petty thieves with her lover Nelson Algren as her guide.