“Living austerely in Paris for more than four decades, turned out politically, aesthetically, and sexually to be a free soul.”Īs a friend, correspondent, and host to a slew of writers, Beach solidified a place in literary history, perhaps most notably as the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Besides well-known contenders like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, patrons included Serge Eisenstein, John Dos Passos, Man Ray, Djuna Barnes, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, George Gershwin, and Paul Valéry. More grandly, it was a literary center for the cross-fertilization of cultures.” The list of writers, artists, and intellectuals who borrowed from it over the years is extensive.

It was, as Noel Riley Fitch writes in her book Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, also a “meeting place, clubhouse, post office, money exchange, and reading room for the famous and soon-to-be famous of the avant garde. Of Beach, Ernest Hemingway said, “No one I ever knew was nicer to me.”įor those two interwar decades, Shakespeare and Company served as more than just a library. Cyril Connolly called it a “cache of dynamite in a solemn crypt” (Litz). Shakespeare and Company’s informality set the tone for a congenial atmosphere that was inviting to many. Beach also secured a pair of drawings by William Blake, and photographs of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and Edgar Allan Poe-an assemblage of writers she admired. The earliest patrons of Shakespeare and Company would have found a modest collection of books: English poetry, a selection of the latest literary magazines, as well as works by Yeats, Joyce, and Pound-all arranged somewhat haphazardly there was no catalogue and no index. “From that moment on, for over twenty years, they never gave me time to meditate,” Beach later wrote in her memoir. Please send money.” At the time, Beach, a 32-year-old ex-pat and former Red Cross worker with an interest in contemporary French literature, wrote that she “had long wanted a bookshop.” Later that year, on November 19, the doors opened at Shakespeare and Company, a small lending library located at 8 rue Dupuytren, a tiny street on the Left Bank. In 1919, Sylvia Beach sent a telegram to her mother in America: “Opening bookshop in Paris.

Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach