During her active intellectual life, Simone de Beauvoir wrote sociological and cultural essays, novels, and a famous autobiography, as well as philosophical works. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and École Normale Supérieure. After reading Husserl in the
1930s, she published her first novel, She Came to Stay, in 1943. Her first major philosophical work was The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). Her most famous work, The Second Sex, appeared in 1949. However, de Beauvoir is also well known for her four volumes of autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstance
(1963), and All Said and Done (1972). In 1970, de Beauvoir wrote Old Age, an investigation of the social construction of old age. In 1981, she published her last book, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre.
