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 Condé 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."

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) is the author of many books, among them The Second Sex (1949) and The Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Goncourt. Carol Cosman is a freelance translator who has also translated Jean-Paul Sartre's The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857. Douglas Brinkley is a Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and the author of a forthcoming biography of Jimmy Carter.

"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

"This new translation captures both de Beauvoir's narrative gift, which makes a scene present in all its sensuous detail, and her enchantment with America at its most mundane."—Elizabeth Powers, Wall Street Journal

"Fine reading for an American audience....She is a stimulating traveling companion all the way."—Atlantic Monthly

"The tough thinker and the joyrider merge beautifully in de Beauvoir's diary of a four-month, cross-country sojourn....This journal is....a mesmerizing road."—Katherine Dieckmann, Voice Literary Supplement

"Brainy and imaginative, critical and rhapsodic--and not to be missed."—Kirkus Reviews

"Impressive, compelling, thought -provoking, and highly recommended."—Library Journal

"Whether she is dancing at the Savoy or in search of jazz in New Orleans, Beauvoir's observations always seem fresh and sometimes even profound."—Santa Fe New Mexican

"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