From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment from New York. I'm Elvis Mitchell. My guest, Hazel Rowley wrote the book, I thought, was quite amazing that was published a few years ago.

Richard Wright, his life in times that I still recommend to people because it was really about romance and I think a real sort of intellectual, a love of intellectualism and love of ideas.

And that book is that ideal is even more prevalent in her new book, Tedette, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre.

Hazel, welcome. Thanks for doing this.

Thank you, Elvis.

Tell me, first of all, what made you feel you wanted to write this book?

Well, it came out of the Richard Wright book, actually.

There is a strong connection between these books.

I think people wonder how I can lurch from, you know,

the biography of an American black man to two French intellectuals, but they had a major effect on each other. Richard Wright was influenced by existentialism,

and their idea, Sartre and Beauvoir's idea of the committed intellectual, was really influenced by Richard Wright.

And they printed some of his work in the very first issue of Le Tomodern in 1945.

And they kept printing him.

They were the ones really who put Richard Wright on the map in France.

And as you know, he moved to Paris in the 50s.

Well, what fascinating to me about the book is that you sort of started with kind of the end, you're meeting with the Beauvoir, and you talk in the preface in the really wonderful way about the way she had become the

basically the keeper of the flame in a way. She maintained that mythology. And as you further

research the book, you kind of found that that was really just almost kind of a hollow pose on her behalf.

Well, it's true that Simone de Beauvoir wrote many volumes of memoirs. And even if she wasn't married to Sartre, these memoirs gave her an opportunity to say to the world, I am the partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, and no woman measures up to me in his affections.

So, I mean, in a sense, she was wearing a very large wedding ring as a result of these books.

And she was leaving out certain of Sartre's girlfriends, and she was making slightly snide remarks about other ones.

...