On Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, and what each of them kept

By Michael Cummins, Editor, November 3, 2026

The grave is easy to find: a plain slab in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris, with two names cut into it. Jean-Paul Sartre was buried there in April 1980, and Simone de Beauvoir joined him six years later, almost to the day. For half a century they were the most famous couple in the life of the mind, and they arranged things so that they never married and never set up house together. The arrangement was the point. At the end of Force of Circumstance, the third volume of her memoirs, she called it the one thing in her life that had unquestionably succeeded.

One thing in that grave belongs to a different story. Beauvoir, it is said, was buried wearing a silver ring that Sartre had not given her. Many accounts repeat this; none we found names anyone who saw the ring go into the grave with her. It came from Nelson Algren, a Chicago novelist, who had slipped it onto her finger in New York in 1947. She had never worn a ring before, she told him. She had spent her adult life refusing the institution a ring usually stands for.

Algren had been dead for five years by then. He died in a rented house on Long Island hung with collages of her letters and the jackets of her books, and on his last day he was still raging about her. Their letters had stopped in 1964. The quarrel lasted until his heart gave out.

She explained the ring herself, in a letter, long before anyone thought to ask. But her explanation opens a harder question, and to reach it we have to begin where the affair began: with a telephone ringing in a Chicago apartment, and a man who would not stay on the line.

I The Operator

In February 1947 Nelson Algren was cooking dinner in a two-room flat on Chicago’s Northwest Side, a place with no bath that rented for ten dollars a month, when the telephone rang. A woman with a foreign accent asked for him. He told her she had the wrong number and hung up. She checked the number and called again. He hung up again.

The woman was Simone de Beauvoir. She was 39, a little over a year older than he was, and famous in France for her novels and for essays on the philosophy she and Sartre had made the fashion of postwar Paris. She was in America for the first time, on a lecture tour, and she knew no one in Chicago. Someone in New York had given her Algren’s number, and they had a friend in common, the novelist Richard Wright. From her room at the Palmer House she tried a third time and asked the hotel operator to place the call. When Algren picked up, the operator spoke first: “Please be patient and stay on the line.” He stayed. When she mentioned Wright, he offered to come downtown.

There was something Beauvoir knew that night and Algren would not learn for seventeen years. The trip itself, by her own later account, had been Sartre’s idea. He had suggested it after falling in love, on his own American journey, with Dolores Vanetti, a radio journalist in New York. Her adventure began in the shadow of someone else’s.

Algren gave her the Chicago he wrote about. On West Madison Street, the city’s skid row, he took her to a bar where a sign forbade dancing and the drunks danced anyway. In a combination bar and flophouse, the woman who ran the place, Lorraine Kimion, asked her, to her astonishment, whether Malraux had a new novel coming and whether Sartre had finished his. The next day he showed her the electric chair, a police line-up and a midnight mission. She stayed about two days and went on with her tour. That spring she asked him to come to her before she went home; when he would not, she flew back to Chicago, and after three days in his flat he flew east with her. They spent about two weeks at the Brevoort Hotel on lower Fifth Avenue, where twenty years earlier, at a tea, Charles Lindbergh had been given the prize for the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris. Before she flew home he slipped a silver ring onto her finger.

Her first letter from Paris said the city seemed dull and dead to her, and that her heart had stayed behind on the corner of Broadway where they parted. She signed herself his wife, forever. Her friends in Paris were amazed by the ring, because she had never worn one. She told him she never took it off. It was a private sign, she wrote, that she belonged to him. In September she came back for two weeks.

A ring was a strange thing for this woman to wear. In 1929, when she and Sartre were young philosophers in Paris, he proposed terms she kept for the rest of his life. Theirs would be the necessary love. Others, contingent loves, would be allowed, provided each told the other everything. They never married and kept separate lodgings, and for half a century they read each other’s drafts. Algren knew enough of this to ask her anyway to marry him and live in Chicago. She refused, at length and in English, and went on writing.

The English mattered. She wrote to him in his language, and she told him it did her good: in English she could not write literature at all, good or bad, only say plainly what she meant. When he remarked how unlike her books the letters were, she put the difference down to language. Michael Rogin, reviewing the letters in the London Review of Books in 1998, offered a better reason. The difference was the man she was writing to.

It is tempting to read what followed as a clash of temperaments, the Parisian intellectual and the Chicago tough. Here is another reading, offered as one: each mind had a habitat, and neither habitat could travel. Hers was conversation: the circle around the pact, and the journal she and Sartre founded in 1945, Les Temps modernes. She wrote alone, and with great discipline; what was social was where her ideas came from. His was a street: the Polish Northwest Side and the skid-row bars where everyone knew him. Neither of them was a loner. Each needed a particular crowd, and neither crowd would cross the Atlantic. New York had offered her a stand-in: the intellectuals around Partisan Review, in Rogin’s account the nearest thing America had to her Paris circle. She liked the city and not them, and he reads her call to Algren as a small revenge. The letters were the one place the two could meet: a third country, built from one thing each, his language and her lifelong habit of correspondence. In that country she could be his wife.

The first trouble came in the second year. In 1948 she arrived for a planned three months, and they went down the Mississippi to New Orleans and on into Mexico. There she told him that Sartre wanted her back in Paris a month early. She did not tell him why. A change in Vanetti’s plans had left Sartre’s summer free. Algren withdrew. She went home and kept writing to him, letter after letter, in the language that left her nowhere to hide.

He kept every one of those letters, and she kept his. Half a century later only one side of the correspondence would be printed, and it would not be his.

II The Lake and the Book

In 1949 it was his turn to cross. He stayed in her Paris apartment, and then they traveled together to Rome, Naples and North Africa. That year he published The Man with the Golden Arm, a novel about a card dealer with a morphine habit on Chicago’s Northwest Side, and in 1950 it won the first National Book Award for fiction.

The next summer the arithmetic changed. She arrived in July 1950, having fitted her trip once again around Sartre’s plans, and she did not go to the flat on Wabansia Avenue that she called their nest. Algren had taken a cottage on Lake Michigan, to be shared with neighbors. He greeted her, according to the notes her editor later wrote, with the news that he no longer loved her, and the notes record that she was stunned. David Caute, reviewing the letters in The Spectator in 1998, called the visit a fiasco.

Then comes the detail that the usual story about her, the famous woman who took what she wanted and flew home, cannot easily absorb. She stayed. She stayed until September, under a shared roof by a lake, with a man who had told her on arrival that it was over. Back in Paris she wrote that her love had not shrunk at all since the day she arrived and found him cold. In 1951 she came once more, briefly, and afterward called herself “a poor heap of crumbling pieces.” She wrote that she had felt guilty toward him from the start, giving him so little of herself while loving him so much, and that she could not blame him for shutting her out. Not blaming him did not make it easier.

Within a year she was living with Claude Lanzmann, seventeen years younger, who had come to her through Les Temps modernes, and they shared her apartment for seven years. The woman who never kept house with Sartre did keep house once. Algren, meanwhile, prepared to remarry the wife he had divorced. As he did, in 1952, she wrote him a letter he kept. We will come back to it.

Then the distance stopped being a choice. In 1953, Rogin writes, Algren applied for a passport to visit her and was refused on account of his Communist affiliations; he had chaired the Chicago committee to save the Rosenbergs. For the rest of the decade he could not leave the country.

The fifties went badly for him. Hollywood filmed his best book with Frank Sinatra and he lost the profits, the critics savaged A Walk on the Wild Side, and he nearly died falling through the ice of Lake Michigan. The books kept them in touch when they could not be. She told him she had begun The Mandarins with his name already on the first page. The novel won the Goncourt in 1954, dedicated to him and with him inside it as Lewis Brogan, the American lover the heroine cannot follow home.

The book is not mainly a love story. Its mandarins are the left-wing writers of postwar Paris, and its argument is the one that consumed them: whether a writer can stay a writer and still act. In the central quarrel, Henri Perron, who edits a newspaper, is shown proof of forced-labor camps in Stalin’s Russia and wants to print it. Robert Dubreuilh, who leads a non-Communist movement of the left, breaks with him over it. Readers took the two for Camus and Sartre. Beauvoir always denied it, unconvincingly by Rogin’s reading, while owning that the Chicago lover was Algren.

Anne, Dubreuilh’s wife, whose reflections make up much of the novel, carries the argument home. Rogin sets her forced choice of her husband over Lewis beside Dubreuilh’s forced break with Henri and his choice of the Soviet Union over the United States: in both stories someone has to pick a side. In the novel, as in the letters, she goes back to her circle, and when the affair ends she comes close to taking her own life. Rogin thought Beauvoir hid her feelings in the book by seeming to expose them: by his account it keeps the ring, briefly, and drops the husband and the wife. Algren’s anger, Rogin notes, never mentioned those changes. After it came out, Algren told Time, by Rogin’s account, that she had been “digging up her own private garden.” Then, in despair, he telephoned Paris to apologize. Lanzmann picked up.

In 1954, the year of the Goncourt, the Brevoort, where they had stayed in New York, was torn down.

In 1959 a British journalist, Kenneth Allsop, found him in the bar of a Polish restaurant on Milwaukee Avenue. Allsop recorded that Beauvoir had once asked Algren, bewildered, why his best friends were pickpockets, addicts and pimps. In the same piece Algren sums up their famous romance in eight words: “I showed her the electric chair and everything.” Her question and his summary are the two habitats in miniature.

Yet at the end of the decade, his passport restored, he went back. In 1960 he spent months in her Paris apartment, which Lanzmann had left. When she went to Brazil with Sartre, Algren stayed on in her flat, and she wrote to him that she loved him more than she ever had, and always would. In 1963 he dedicated his next book, Who Lost an American?, to her.

The turn came in the autumn of 1964. Her memoir Force of Circumstance had appeared in French the year before, and Algren read no French. Now Harper’s printed excerpts in English, in two installments: “The Question of Fidelity” in November and “An American Rendezvous” in December. The fidelity in question, as Rogin reads it, was Sartre’s before it was hers. Algren learned that her trip to America had begun with Sartre’s love for Vanetti, and that Sartre had urged her to go. He learned that the month she cut from their 1948 summer had been Vanetti’s doing too. He learned that she had explained him in the vocabulary of contingent love, that he appeared only at the end of the first installment, and that she had quoted his letters while keeping every one of hers private. Her last letter to him is dated November 1964. Rogin reads it as the letter of a woman who did not yet know the break she had already set in motion.

Algren had survived being a character in her novel. What he could not survive was discovering he had been a chapter in Sartre’s story. In May 1965 he answered in the same magazine, with a review titled “The Question of Simone de Beauvoir” that Rogin describes as misogynist rage; it is not reprinted here. He went on attacking her for years, in the Los Angeles Times and in Playboy, and finally in a posthumous novel, The Devil’s Stocking, that Rogin reads as revenge. Their neutral country had been annexed: its story now belonged to a French book from her own publisher, told in her own language. Her letters had made a vow. Her memoir delivered a verdict, and he answered with one of his own.

She had printed his letters and kept her own.

III The Tin Box

By the spring of 1981 Algren had found, late, a place that suited him. He had moved to Sag Harbor, the old whaling town near the eastern end of Long Island, and by a friend’s account was happier there than he had been in a decade, with new friends among the writers nearby, Kurt Vonnegut and Peter Matthiessen among them. He had just been elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, an honor he at first took for something like the Mark Twain Society, which you paid to join. On the walls of his rented saltbox house, among photographs of prizefighters and a portrait of Dostoevsky, hung collages he had made of her letters and the jackets of her books.

Hours before the end, already suffering chest pains, he raged about her to a young admirer, as Rogin tells it. Even prostitutes, he said, close the door on their customers; she had thrown it wide and invited in the public and the press. He said he kept her letters in a tin box, and that he would get even by selling them at auction.

A Chicago newspaperman, Jan Herman, had asked Algren for an interview. Algren went one better and offered a party, set for two o’clock on May 9. Herman flew in and called from a phone booth a few blocks from the house. A friend of Algren’s, a New York homicide detective named Roy Finer, answered. “Don’t come,” Finer said. “He’s gone.” Algren had collapsed in the bathroom with a heart attack. The dial of his wristwatch was smashed, its hands stopped at 6:05.

Later that day, with Herman standing in the house, the telephone rang again. It was Kurt Vonnegut, who had planned to bring a younger novelist, Salman Rushdie, to the party; Rushdie, Vonnegut later wrote, had asked to meet Algren. A voice answered with the name of the Sag Harbor Police Department. Vonnegut apologized and said he must have the wrong number. He did not. The story had begun in 1947 with Algren telling a stranger she had the wrong number; it ended with a friend saying the same thing into his telephone.

He was buried in Sag Harbor, in Oakland Cemetery, among the old whalers. The man who could not forgive her for putting their love on display had spent his last months in a house hung with it.

The auction he threatened happened without him. After his death her letters were sold at public sale, and Ohio State University bought them. They came to rest in Columbus, a city that belonged to neither of them. Beauvoir died in Paris on April 14, 1986. In 1997 her letters to Algren were published in French, and a year later in English, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, her adopted daughter and heir. Le Bon summarized his side of the correspondence herself and wrote only that publishing both sides had not proved possible. Her introduction, as Rogin quotes it, pictured Algren dying alone with no one to bury him. Rogin called that an invention, and Herman’s account of the party, the detective and the cemetery suggests he was right.

Among the letters he kept, perhaps in that tin box, was the one from 1952. Algren was preparing to remarry. Beauvoir was settling into her life with Lanzmann. The summers by the lake were over. She wrote to tell him about a dream. In it, she said, she had told him: “I should be buried with your ring at my finger.” She added that this was what she meant to do.

So the question has an answer, and it is in her own hand. Thirty-four years later she is said to have done exactly what she wrote. But the answer only sharpens a harder question. What does it mean to keep a promise to a man who would spend much of the rest of his life attacking you, and who, at the end, lived among your letters?

Her letters are in print now. His are still kept.

The Slab

Go back to the grave in Montparnasse. Of everything this love left behind, two documents and one object make claims of different kinds. Her letters made a vow; she signed them as his wife. Her memoir delivered a verdict: at its end she called her bond with Sartre the one success of her life beyond doubt, and in its pages Algren was a contingent love in a story that began with someone else’s. The ring is neither vow nor verdict. It promises nothing new and judges nothing. It was simply kept.

He kept her letters on his walls, and in a box he meant to sell. She kept his ring on her hand. Neither of them kept the other.

Perhaps she was keeping faith with him. Or perhaps with the woman she had been when she first put it on. As her first American journey began, she wrote that she hoped the country would let her become someone else, and the book she made of that journey ends with her bracing to settle back into France and into her own skin. For a few years, on paper, in his language, the other woman lasted. The ring was the one object that third country produced, given in New York, between her Paris and his Chicago, and it went home with her for good. It may belong to that other Simone.

None of the accounts we found names anyone who saw the ring go into the grave with her. The story has been repeated rather than attested, which suits a love that survives in what each of them chose to keep. She was buried, the story goes, beside the man she would not marry, wearing the ring of the man she would not follow home.

⁂

Sources: Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to Nelson Algren, published as Lettres à Nelson Algren (Gallimard, 1997) and in English as Beloved Chicago Man (Gollancz) and A Transatlantic Love Affair (The New Press, 1998), edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, as quoted and described by Michael Rogin, “More than ever and for ever,” London Review of Books, vol. 20, no. 18, September 1998, and David Caute, “The man with the stony heart,” The Spectator, August 22, 1998. Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (1963; English 1965) and America Day by Day (1948), as quoted by Rogin; her excerpts in Harper’s, “The question of fidelity (part I),” November 1964, and “An American rendezvous (part II),” December 1964, translated by Richard Howard; Nelson Algren, “The question of Simone de Beauvoir,” Harper’s, May 1965. Peter Carlson, “Encounter: Made in Chicago,” American History, November/December 2016; Colin Asher, Never a Lovely So Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren (W. W. Norton, 2019), as excerpted in Literary Hub, April 2019; Kenneth Allsop, “A Talk on the Wild Side,” The Spectator, October 16, 1959. On her September 1947 return: the letters as excerpted in the Mail & Guardian. On The Mandarins: Shane Mage’s review in International Socialist Review, Winter 1957, with Wikipedia and EBSCO Research Starters for the cast and plot. Jan Herman, “Forever and a Day,” ArtsJournal, 2006, reprinting his Chicago Sun-Times report of May 1981, and “Vonnegut, Terkel do the honors,” 2005, with Kurt Vonnegut’s account of May 9, 1981. On the Brevoort: the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Raymond Orteig Testimonial Dinner Program (NASM.2001.0051); WestView News, July 2012; and Stanley Turkel, Hotel-Online. On Dolores Vanetti, Sicard, Roma Tre Press, 2020. On Algren’s grave, the New York State Literary Tree. Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; outside literary cold read by Claude Fable 5.1; images generated by Gemini Argon.