La Force de l'âge Reading Order

La Force de l'âge (The Prime of Life, 1960) is the second volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography, covering the decade from 1929 to 1944 — from her first years of teaching philosophy in provincial lycées, through the 1930s in Paris (her relationship with Sartre, her own love affairs, her reading and writing), the period of the phoney war and the German invasion, and finally the years of the Occupation, ending with the Liberation. This volume is in some ways the richest of the autobiography: it covers the period of Beauvoir's intellectual formation as a writer, her first attempts at fiction (she destroyed several manuscripts), her discovery of the social and political implications of her philosophical position, and the daily texture of living in Paris under the Germans — the cold, the food shortages, the collaboration, the Resistance, and the way intellectuals managed to maintain a cultural life of considerable richness in the midst of occupation. The Occupation chapters are especially valuable: Beauvoir describes in extraordinary detail what it was like to live in Paris from 1940 to 1944 — who ate well and who starved, how people navigated the curfews and the censorship, what it felt like to be a Parisian intellectual who was not Jewish and who therefore had a kind of protected position that she did not fully use. The relationship with Sartre — both its nature and its limits — is also central to this volume.