*The Coming of Age* by Simone de Beauvoir. Shanghai Translation Publishing House

In addition to her internationally renowned theoretical masterpiece, *The Second Sex*, French thinker Simone de Beauvoir also authored four volumes of memoirs. These extensive memoirs are sufficient to solidify her position as one of France's greatest memoirists.

*The Prime of Life*, the second volume of her memoirs, was published in France in 1960. It chronicles Beauvoir's experiences from 1929 to 1945, detailing her teaching career in Rouen, Marseille, and elsewhere after graduation, her first steps towards finding her life's purpose and beginning to write, and her connections with a dazzling array of European literary and intellectual figures. It also vividly portrays the turbulent and critical times and the devastation France suffered during World War II.

This period was crucial for Beauvoir. Not only did she fulfill her childhood dream of entering society independently and write her first novel, *She Came to Stay*, establishing writing as her lifelong goal, but she also rapidly matured in the brutal wartime environment, transforming from an observer of life into an "engaged writer."