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The deaths of Mencken's friends, among them Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, and Joseph Hergesheimer left him free to seek out the company of other standbys: his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, and George Jean Nathan. He also sought out the company of women. Among his siblings, he was closest to August Mencken, who seemed to share his view of the world.

With the advent of the Progressive era, Mencken began to question American attitudes towards emotion, conformity, and Puritanism. This was brought home to him when he watched William Jennings Bryan speak at the 1912 Democratic National Convention. Mencken takes a trip to Germany rekindle his deep attachment to the land of his forebears. Influencing him in this regard were his conversations with friends, Percival Pollard and James Huneker, both writers who had influenced his reading as an adolescent. Mencken began to write a series of articles that examined Americans. He also continued his work at The Smart Set magazine, and met his future publisher, Alfred Knopf, as the war in Europe got closer to America.

Nearly twenty years after Margaret Simons broke the news of the scandal of the English translation of Le deuxième sexe, Toril Moi’s 2002 essay deepened feminist claims in relation to Parshley’s translation. This reprint chronicles the long and at that time unsuccessful struggle with Alfred Knopf for a new translation/scholarly edition. Moi showed that “the philosophical incompetence” of the translation damaged both de Beauvoir’s reputation and that of feminist philosophy by detailing Parshley’s silent deletions of sentences and parts of sentences, his tendency to turn “existence” into “essence,” misreading of philosophical references to “subjectivity,” botched references to Hegel, misunderstanding of Beauvoir’s account of alienation, and elimination of nuance from key discussions of themes like motherhood. Since de Beauvoir’s works will not enter public domain until 2056, the refusal of the publisher to commission a new translation meant that essays like this one were essential to teaching Beauvoir’s Second Sex to English-speaking students.

Nearly 20 years after Margaret Simons broke the news of the scandal of the English translation of Le deuxième sexe, Toril Moi’s 2002 essay deepened feminist claims in relation to Parshley’s translation, and chronicled the long and still-unsuccessful struggle with Alfred Knopf for a new translation/scholarly edition. Moi showed that “the philosophical incompetence of the translation produces a text that is damaging to Beauvoir’s intellectual reputation in particular and to the reputation of feminist philosophy in general” by detailing Parshley’s silent deletions of sentences and parts of sentences, his tendency to turn existence into essence, misread philosophical references to “subjectivity”, remain clueless about references to Hegel, and misunderstand Beauvoir’s account of alienation. These failures falsely emboldened Beauvoir’s critics by eliminating nuance from key discussions of themes like motherhood. “Her works will not enter the public domain until 2056,” Moi pointed out, and the stubborn refusal of the publisher to commission a new translation meant that essays like this one were absolutely essential to teaching Beauvoir’s Second Sex to English speaking students—“while we wait.”