The Letters of Sylvia Beach

Summary:

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) has been called the patron saint of independent bookstores. Founder of the Left Bank’s Shakespeare & Company in 1919 and first publisher of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (1922), her facility for nurturing talent and promoting the avant-garde are legendary. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach’s day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Beach’s friends and clients included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Richard Wright. As librarian, publicist, publisher, and translator, she carved out a unique place at the crossroads of English and French letters.

This volume reveals Beach’s wit and resourcefulness, sharing her negotiations with Marianne Moore to place Joyce’s work in “The Dial”; her battle to curb the piracy of “Ulysses” in the United States; her struggle to keep Shakespeare & Company afloat during the Depression; and her long love affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier. The letters also illuminate Beach’s childhood in Princeton, New Jersey, her work in Serbia for the American Red Cross, her internment in a German prison camp during the Second World War, and her friendships with a new expatriate generation in the 1950s and 1960s. The consummate American in Paris and a tireless champion of the avant-garde, through her letters, Beach provides a fresh window into the modernist movement.