Tete-A-Tete: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

Enthralling … Here we find an ugly, walleyed existentialist philosopher, the elegantly beautiful author of The Second Sex and the Gallic equivalent of a bevy of young starlets who share the bed of one or the other–or sometimes both. Readers will turn these pages alternately mesmerized and appalled. – Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

Passionate, freethinking existentialist philosopher-writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are one of the world’s legendary couples. Their committed but notoriously open union generated no end of controversy in their day. Biographer Hazel Rowley offers the first dual portrait of these two colossal figures and their intense, often embattled relationship. Through original interviews and access to new primary sources, Rowley portrays Sartre and Beauvoir up close.

Tete-a-Tete magnificently details the passion, daring, humor, and contradictions of a remarkably unorthodox relationship.