America Day by Day

Her travel diary records with fresh, hungry, sensuous curiosity the cultural climate of postwar America just before the Cold War closed down. No writer could be better company in that complex, vanished world than Simone de Beauvoir

Diane Middlebrook

Simone de Beauvoir in New York City in 1947: Like all Europeans she begins to lament the obvious the hard edges, the crude self-involvement, the absence of café life and then suddenly she gives herself up to the aloneness of the city with a responsiveness astonishing for the brilliance it generates. Fifty years later it is still exciting to be in her company as she discovers unexpected love for the capital of the new world.

Vivian Gornick

A great living document of America in the forties

Scotsman

For women, and men, who want to experience vicariously Jack Kerouac's open road with less macho romanticism and more existential savvy, America Day by Day, hidden from us for nearly 50 years, comes to the reader like a dusty bottle of Vintage French cognac, asking only to be uncorked

New York Times Book Review

de Beauvoir’s reflections are discerning, thought-provoking, and in places even funny, like Bill Bryson if he were a nerdy Frenchwoman with a taste for philosophy… every page offers a deft observation… [a] blazing book

The Times