Simone de Beauvoir

Beauvoir shed her strict Catholic upbringing by her teens and became, at twenty-one, the youngest person ever to pass France's grueling philosophy agrégation exam, narrowly outranked by Jean-Paul Sartre, whom she met that same year and bound herself to in a famous 'essential' partnership that allowed both of them other, 'contingent' loves. She taught philosophy in lycées until 1943, when a scandal over her relationship with a student cost her the post.

The Second Sex (1949), her sweeping study of women's constructed subordination, scandalized the French establishment and was placed on the Vatican's list of banned books; it became feminism's founding modern text. The Mandarins (1954), her novel of postwar Left Bank intellectuals, won the Prix Goncourt. She wrote frankly about her affair with the American novelist Nelson Algren, and died in Paris in 1986, buried beside Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery.