One of the classic “Americans in Paris,” Sylvia Beach lived in Paris before the Great War and after. After mingling with the bohemian set and making friends with many literary personages (including Hemingway, André Gide and Paul Valéry), she used money given to her by her mother to set up an English-language bookstore in a former laundry on rue Dupuytren. She dubbed it Shakespeare and Company, and with early success in the 20s, moved it to rue de l’Odéon.
Shakespeare became a center of expatriate literary life. Beach moved into publishing in 1922 with James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel that scandalized the publishing world and much of the public. Dealing with the complexities of circulating the work (and the complexities of dealing with Joyce’s often eccentric editing and book production demands) almost bankrupted Shakespeare and Company. But literary figures, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, continued to congregate at the shop and at parties where Sylvia was an animating figure.
James Joyce and Sylvia Beach
The shop remained open until 1940. The story goes that Sylvia angered a German officer by refusing to sell him her last copy of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. She was later interned by the Germans, and even after the liberation of Paris, the shop never officially reopened. She published a memoir in 1955 titled Shakespeare and Company, though critics have suggested that many accounts within were inaccurate.
Beach died in 1962, though she bequeathed the Shakespeare and Company name to another American bookseller, George Whitman, who opened a shop under its name at a different location in Paris. She is buried in the Princeton Cemetery and her papers are archived at Princeton University. See more about Beach at her Wikipedia page.