About the Author

Simone de Beauvoir is the author of The Second Sex and the winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's highest honor, for The Mandarins. One of our greatest contemporary novelists, Patrick O’Brian is the author of the twenty volumes of the best-selling Aubrey/Maturin series, as well as many other books, including Testimonies, The Golden Ocean, The Unknown Shore, and biographies of Joseph Banks and Picasso.