James Baldwin was an essayist, novelist, and playwright born in Harlem in 1924. In 1948, he traveled to France, where he wrote his first collection of essays along with two novels, including the semi-autobiographical work “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” In an interview published in 1984 by “The Paris Review,” Baldwin spoke of returning from Paris to the United States, meeting Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and finding himself in the center of the civil rights movement. “I didn’t think of myself as a public speaker, or as a spokesman,” he said, “but I knew I could get a story past the editor’s desk.” Realizing he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t, he spent the rest of his life writing on themes of race and justice. 

Simone de Beauvoir was a philosopher in the tradition of existentialism. Born in Paris in 1908, she came of age alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, and the two worked together, starting in 1945, to edit a monthly review titled “Le Temps Modernes.” Her book-length essay, 1949’s “The Second Sex,” attempted to tell human history from a feminist perspective. In it, she explores the idea that women have traditionally been viewed in opposition to men, and leans on biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism to expose the myth of female inferiority. To this day, the work is considered a pillar of feminist literature, exposing the unhappiness born of inequality so that we might work as a society to correct it.