De Beauvoir travelled intrepidly from New York to Washington, San Francisco to Las Vegas, Chicago (where she met Nelson Algren) to New Orleans and the Deep South. Her account is packed with beautiful descriptions and penetrating observations about postwar American culture, food, and landscape - some of historical interest, some, which ring just as true today. De Beauvoir loved exploring the seamier side of cities - visiting drug dens in Chicago, smoking poet a bohemian parties in New York. She was shocked by the vast gulf between rich and proof everywhere in the country, and by segregation in the Deep South. America Day by Day is classic travel writing - vivid, personal, and inquisitive.