Simone de Beauvoir's travel diary — if Bill Bryson were a nerdy French woman
'The splendid flight becomes applied navigation,' she writes of her turbulent descent towards La Guardia airport, for example. 'The string of pearls become streets, the crystal balls are streetlamps … a factory smokestack sways in the sky.'
Originally published in 1948, a year before The Second Sex, and this month dusted off and reissued by Vintage Classics, the journal of de Beauvoir's US jaunt covers just over four months. From January to May 1947, she travelled coast to coast by train, and then back again on a series of Greyhound buses, taking in Chicago, Hollywood, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada and Arizona, among other places, while popping into various universities to give lectures.
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