A Woman to Know: Sylvia Beach
I am a citizen of the world. — Sylvia
(Photo by Gisele Freund)
Sylvia was like the ultimate fairy godmother of Paris's legendary expat era. She owned the world's greatest bookstore (the legendary Shakespeare & Company in Paris), ran the first editions of James Joyce's Ulysses (considered ULTRA scandalous for its time because there was a MASTURBATION SCENE, gasp!) and published the first book Ernest Hemingway ever wrote, like EVER (it's actually not that great a book).
She was also best friends with Gertrude Stein and rented out bunkbeds inside her bookstore for young writers, artists and anyone else who didn't have a place in Paris to crash. Her memoir is a who's who's of the Parisian arts scene, with cameo appearances from the Fitzgeralds, Man Ray, T.S. Eliot, basically anyone you'd ever want to have at a dream dinner party.
Add to your reading list:
Shakespeare and Company (Sylvia Beach)
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris (Noel Riley Fitch)
Chasing Sylvia Beach (Cynthia Morris)
Ulysses: An Unabridged Replication of the Original Shakespeare and Company Edition (James Joyce)
Read more:
Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, a Mecca for Literary Travelers (The Literary Traveler)
Ex-Pat Paris as it Sizzled for One Literary Lioness (The New York Times)
Books and their Makers: Sylvia Beach and James Joyce (The New Yorker)
In Praise of Sylvia Beach (The Hemingway Project)
Read more:
Paris Was a Woman (Greta Schiller)
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