A transatlantic love affair
Subtitle: letters to Nelson Algren
By: Simone de Beauvoir ; [compilation and annotation by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir ; notes and English translations  by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir ... et al.].
Contributors: Algren, Nelson, 1909-; Le Bon de Beauvoir, Sylvie.; Reeves, Ellen Gordon.; Kling, Vanessa.
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 559
Subjects: Beauvoir, Simone de, 1908- -- Correspondence.; Algren, Nelson, 1909- -- Correspondence.; Authors, French -- 20th century -- Correspondence.
Other titles: Letters to Nelson Algren
Description: In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir met Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nelson Algren in Chicago, and it was love at first sight. A passionate affair ensued, spanning twenty years and four continents in an era when a transatlantic flight took twenty-four hours and overseas telephone calls were a luxury. A Transatlantic Love Affair collects the more than three hundred love letters written in English by de Beauvoir to Algren.

Unique among the prolific correspondence de Beauvoir conducted throughout her life, these letters involved someone not at all of her world. De Beauvoir was forced to explain to Algren everything that usually went without saying: her background, her life in Paris, and the political situation in Paris.

The result is a cross between a personal memoir and an insider's intellectual history of Left Bank life in post-war Paris, populated with luminaries including Albert Camus, Truman Capote, Colette, Alberto Giacometti, Margaret Mead, and Richard Wright.
Notes: Letters first published in French, but originally written in English.
Includes bibliographical references.