Simone de Beauvoir is known to a wide audience primarily as the author of *The Second Sex* (1949), a seminal work exploring the status of women and their oppression. Twenty years later, Beauvoir published a book no less monumental than that famous opus, examining the experience of old age and its social dimensions. The author’s aim was to "break the conspiracy of silence" and answer the questions: how does society perceive old age, and what does it mean to grow old? Why is an elderly person treated like a "member of an alien species," as if their lot were not the universal destiny of all humanity? Aging is a biological phenomenon situated within an economic and cultural context; to understand the situation of the elderly, in the first part of *Old Age* (1970), Beauvoir draws on findings from biology, ethnology, history, and sociology, while in the second part, she explores the inner lives of the elderly—discussing their attitudes toward time, society, and their own bodies, as well as toward family, loneliness, and death.