Google has celebrated what would have been the 106th birthday of the French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir with a Google Doodle on the search engine's home page.
Born Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir on 9 January 1908 in Paris, De Beauvoir is best known for her book The Second Sex, one of the most important works of 20th-century feminism, and novels such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins.
De Beauvoir had a lifelong partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, which did not exclude other relationships. She said the absence of marriage and children allowed her to pursue her studies and writing.
The doodle features an image of the writer in front of Parisian street buildings with canopies, which suggest the Cafe de Flore in the 6th district of Paris with which Beauvoir and Sartre were associated.
Beauvoir and Sartre were proponents of the philosophy of existentialism and both edited the magazine Les Temps Modernes. De Beauvoir edited it until her death in 1986.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/09/simone-de-beauvoir-google-doodle