America Day by Day

by SimonedeBeauvoir (Author), Carol Cosman (Translator)

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $42.75

  Here is the ultimate American road book, one with a perspective unlike that of any other. In January 1947 Simone de Beauvoir landed at La Guardia airport and began a four-month journey that took her from one coast of the United States to the other, and back again. Embraced by the Conde Nast set in a swirl of cocktail parties in New York, where she was hailed as the 'prettiest existentialist' by Janet Flanner in The New Yorker , de Beauvoir traveled west by car, train, and Greyhound, immersing herself in the nation's culture, customs, people, and landscape. The detailed diary she kept of her trip became America Day by Day , published in France in 1948 and offered here in a completely new translation. It is one of the most intimate, warm, and compulsively readable texts from the great writer's pen. Fascinating passages are devoted to Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans, Las Vegas, and San Antonio. We see de Beauvoir gambling in a Reno casino, smoking her first marijuana cigarette in the Plaza Hotel, donning raingear to view Niagara Falls, lecturing at Vassar College, and learning firsthand about the Chicago underworld of morphine addicts and petty thieves with her lover Nelson Algren as her guide. This fresh, faithful translation superbly captures the essence of Simone de Beauvoir's distinctive voice. It demonstrates once again why she is one of the most profound, original, and influential writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. On New York: 'I walk between the steep cliffs at the bottom of a canyon where no sun penetrates: it's permeated by a salt smell. Human history is not inscribed on these carefully calibrated buildings: They are closer to prehistoric caves than to the houses of Paris or Rome'. On Los Angeles: 'I watch the Mexican dances and eat chili con carne, which takes the roof off my mouth, I drink the tequila and I'm utterly dazed with pleasure'.

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $20.93

  De Beauvoir travelled intrepidly from New York to Washington, San Francisco to Las Vegas, Chicago (where she met Nelson Algren) to New Orleans and the Deep South. Her account is packed with beautiful descriptions and penetrating observations about postwar American culture, food, and landscape - some of historical interest, some, which ring just as true today. De Beauvoir loved exploring the seamier side of cities - visiting drug dens in Chicago, smoking poet a bohemian parties in New York. She was shocked by the vast gulf between rich and proof everywhere in the country, and by segregation in the Deep South. America Day by Day is classic travel writing - vivid, personal, and inquisitive.