Beloved Chicago man: letters to Nelson Algren 1947-64. Simone De Beauvoir. 1998.

Simone De Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre and the romantic intrigues of their Paris milieu have dominated accounts of her private life; but the most passionate love affair of De Beauvoir’s life was with an American novelist who lived thousands of miles away in the slums of Chicago.

De Beauvoir met Nelson Algren in 1947, when she was thirty-nine years old. An unlikely couple in many ways, they fell deeply in love. She flew back to Paris, shaken by the depth of her feelings, and for the next seventeen years, between infrequent meetings, De Beauvoir poured out her heart to Algren in hundreds of wonderful letters. Her only writing in English - a language into which she threw herself with unselfconscious, inventive panache- these letters are gathered in Beloved Chicago Man.