The author of this ravishing book is the novelist in Simone de Beauvoir at thirty-something. 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 NY 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