Short answers, pulled from the story.
Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist, born in Paris on the 9th of January 1908 and died there on the 14th of April 1986. She is best known for The Second Sex, a foundational tract of contemporary feminism, though she did not consider herself a philosopher.
The Second Sex, published in 1949 as Le Deuxième Sexe, is a detailed analysis of women's oppression and the distinction between biological sex and the social construction of gender. It is famous for the line "One is not born woman but becomes woman" and argues that men made women the Other in society.
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre became a couple in October 1929 and remained partners for 51 years until Sartre's death in 1980. Their bond was a lifelong soul partnership that was sexual but not exclusive, and they never married or lived together.
Beauvoir was initially reluctant to call herself a feminist, fearing she would be enclosed in "a sort of feminist concrete block." She publicly declared herself a feminist in 1972 after concluding that a socialist revolution alone would not bring about women's liberation.
Simone de Beauvoir won the Prix Goncourt in 1954 for The Mandarins, the Jerusalem Prize in 1975, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1978. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961, 1969, and 1973.
Beauvoir briefly lost her teaching job after being accused of seducing her 17-year-old pupil Natalie Sorokine, and her licence to teach was revoked before being reinstated. Bianca Lamblin, Natalie Sorokine, and Olga Kosakiewicz all later said their relationships with Beauvoir had damaged them psychologically, and in 1977 Beauvoir signed a petition supporting three men arrested for sexual relations with children.