Reading Order
The Mandarins Reading Order
The Mandarins (1954) by Simone de Beauvoir is the novel that won the Prix Goncourt and is the finest of her fiction — a roman à clef about the Parisian intellectual left in the years immediately after the Liberation, in which Anne Dubreuilh (a psychoanalyst, based on Beauvoir herself) and her husband Robert (a novelist and political figure, based on Sartre) and their friend Henri Perron (a novelist and editor, based on Camus) navigate the postwar world with its revelations, disappointments, and political choices. The novel is organized around two central threads: the love affair between Anne and Lewis Brogan (based on Nelson Algren, with whom Beauvoir had her most passionate relationship) and the political struggles of the postwar left — whether to expose the Soviet labor camps at the risk of weakening the French Communist Party; whether political commitment is compatible with artistic integrity; what the intellectual's relationship to political power should be. Beauvoir said the novel was her most ambitious work and the one closest to her actual experience of the postwar world.
Where to start
The Mandarins (1954) — the complete novel. Best Beauvoir reading order: She Came to Stay → The Blood of Others → The Mandarins → The Second Sex → Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.
Complete The Mandarins Book List
- 1Buy
The Mandarins
Simone de Beauvoir·1954·The complete novel — Anne, Robert Dubreuilh, Henri Perron, and Lewis Brogan in postwar Paris. Winner of the Prix Goncourt 1954; the roman à clef about the postwar Parisian intellectual world; the finest of Beauvoir's novels - 2Buy
She Came to Stay
Simone de Beauvoir·1943·The companion first novel — Françoise, Pierre, and Xavière. The companion investigation of the existentialist subject in prewar fiction: where She Came to Stay is about the philosophical problem of the Other in personal relationships, The Mandarins is about the same problem in the political sphere - 3Buy
The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir·1949·The companion philosophical masterwork. The companion investigation of the same subject from the philosophical rather than the fictional angle: The Mandarins is the lived experience that The Second Sex analyzes; Anne Dubreuilh is a woman whose intellectual and emotional life is shaped by the constraints that The Second Sex identifies and names - 4Buy
Nausea
Jean-Paul Sartre·1938·Sartre's companion novel — Roquentin in Bouville. The companion investigation of the intellectual in his solitude: where Sartre's Roquentin is alone with his nausea and his diary, Beauvoir's Anne and Robert are embedded in a world of political commitment and personal relationship, and The Mandarins is partly an investigation of what happens to the Sartrean intellectual when he is not alone - 5Buy
The Fall
Albert Camus·1956·Camus's companion novel — Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Amsterdam. The companion investigation of the same postwar intellectual climate from the other side of the Sartre-Camus quarrel: where The Mandarins dramatizes the quarrel between the figures based on Sartre and Camus, The Fall is Camus's own processing of the same rupture in the form of a philosophical novel - 6Buy
The Rebel
Albert Camus·1951·Camus's companion essay on revolt and history. The companion philosophical text to The Mandarins's political investigations: The Rebel is the essay that precipitated the public quarrel between Sartre and Camus, and The Mandarins dramatizes the human consequences of that quarrel - 7Buy
Prime of Life
Simone de Beauvoir·1960·Beauvoir's companion autobiography — her life from meeting Sartre to the Liberation. The companion as autobiographical context: The Prime of Life tells the story of the years that preceded The Mandarins, and reading the autobiography alongside the novel shows how Beauvoir transforms life into fiction - Buy
A Farewell to Arms
OptionalErnest Hemingway·1929·Hemingway's companion — Henry and Catherine. The companion as the prototype of the love affair across cultural difference: Anne and Lewis, like Henry and Catherine, conduct their love in the interstices between a larger historical situation and their private world
The Mandarins — Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Lewis Brogan in The Mandarins based on?
Lewis Brogan is based on Nelson Algren, the American novelist (The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side) with whom Simone de Beauvoir had a passionate love affair from 1947 until the early 1950s. Beauvoir met Algren on her first trip to the United States in 1947; they fell in love almost immediately and maintained a relationship (with long periods of separation) for several years. Beauvoir described Algren as the great love of her life alongside Sartre, though her relationship with Sartre was her primary commitment. The love affair between Anne and Lewis in The Mandarins is closely based on Beauvoir's relationship with Algren, including its geography (Chicago, New York, a trip to Mexico), its emotional intensity, and its eventual end.
Why did The Mandarins win the Prix Goncourt?
The Mandarins won the Prix Goncourt in 1954 — France's most prestigious literary prize — because it was recognized as the definitive novel of the postwar Parisian intellectual world: its scope (the entire postwar French intellectual left, from the Liberation to the mid-1950s), its formal ambition (the two-voice narrative alternating between Anne's first-person interior account and the third-person narration of Henri's public life), and its treatment of the central political and philosophical questions of the period (the revelation of the Soviet labor camps; the relationship between intellectual commitment and political power; the possibility of love in a world of political choice) were all identified as achievements of the first order. The Goncourt jury's choice was also a recognition of Beauvoir's literary stature independent of her philosophical work, which had previously overshadowed her fiction.
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