Portrait
Sylvia Beach
Born
14 March 1887Baltimore, USA
Died
5 October 1962Paris, France · aged 75
Bookseller and publisherUnited States

Sylvia Beach

Her Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company published James Joyce’s “Ulysses” – and she shared her life with the bookseller across the street.

Sylvia Beach grew up in the United States and in France, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. In 1916 she went to Paris to study French literature and there discovered the bookshop of Adrienne Monnier, La Maison des Amis des Livres. The two women fell in love and remained partners for almost forty years.

With Monnier’s encouragement, in 1919 Beach opened her own English-language bookshop and lending library, Shakespeare and Company, which soon moved to rue de l’Odéon, opposite Monnier’s shop. It became the meeting place of the American and British writers in Paris: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes and above all James Joyce.

When no publisher dared to print Joyce’s “Ulysses” because of its explicit passages, Beach published it herself in 1922 – a decision that made literary history but almost ruined her financially.

During the German occupation she closed her shop in 1941 after refusing to sell a German officer her last copy of “Finnegans Wake”, and was interned for six months. After the war she did not reopen the shop. Monnier died in 1955. Beach died in Paris in 1962, aged 75.

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