Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, in the winter of 1921. Soon after, he befriended several influential expatriate writers and artists including Gertrude Stein, Ezra ...Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, he did not nurture these relationships; instead he had a knack for destroying them. But there was one friendship that lasted forty years: his relationship with Shakespeare and Company bookshop owner Sylvia Beach. This essay explores why Sylvia Beach was so important to Ernest Hemingway, supporting all of his works, and never judging him when he moved on to another wife. In addition, this examination reveals why Hemingway reciprocated in their relationship-an atypical action for the author from Oak Park, Illinois.
SHAKESPEARE ON THE LEFT BANK TOLL, SEYMOUR I.
The Sewanee review,
09/2012, Volume:
120, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Toll profiles Sylvia Beach, an American who has been rightly called the patron saint of independent bookshops. She was "canonized" for founding Shakespeare and Company, her renowned Paris bookshop ...and lending library.
Inturned Beach, Sylvia; Walsh, Keri
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2009, Volume:
124, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) is remembered primarily for the two feats of which she was proudest, publishing
Ulysses
and “STEERing a little bookshop for about twenty-two years between the two wars,” as ...she puts it in the text reprinted here. Her “little bookshop,” Shakespeare and Company, was for Ernest Hemingway “a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living” (35). In 1919, with support from Adrienne Monnier, the owner of a neighboring bookstore, Beach launched the Left Bank shop that would serve as a hub for French and expatriate writers.
1
In her 1959 memoir,
Shakespeare and Company
, Beach tells stories of her friends and patrons, who included F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valéry, Simone de Beauvoir, HD (Hilda Doolittle), Samuel Beckett, and many others. Beach also describes there her other great feat, the publication of
Ulysses.
When British and American printers were prevented from publishing Joyce's Dublin epic because it was considered too obscene, Beach stepped in. Her fortuitous situation as a seller of English-language books in Paris inspired her to risk bringing out
Ulysses
herself. In February 1922, after a legendary struggle, the first edition of
Ulysses
appeared under the imprint “Shakespeare and Company.”
Edel knew Sylvia Beach in the 1920s and 1930s, during the time of her greatest success. He went in search of the writer/bookseller to determine what had become of her and her bookshop, Shakespeare ...and Co, in the time since. Edel reminisces about their times together.
SHELF LIFE Palattella, John
The Nation (New York, N.Y.),
08/2010, Volume:
291, Issue:
5/6
Magazine Article
Palattella features Sylvia Beach, founder of the legendary English-language Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Beach told a version a half-century ago in her memoir Shakespeare and Company; ...Shari Benstock offered another thirty years later in Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. She published Ulysses, arranged for the first French translation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," translated Henri Michaux and advocated for a French edition of Yeats's poems. But there's no use denying it: her letters are generally tedious. Literary gossip, personal confessions, rants, raves and judgments about the work of the authors Beach championed are mostly absent. Her letters, dutiful exercises in the tallying of personal and business obligations renewed, satisfied and overdue, often feel like they were torn from a ledger. Yet in the tedium of the letters lies a valuable lesson: literary institutions are hard-won achievements.
The Believer Walsh, Keri
The American scholar,
07/2022
Magazine Article
Joyce was relentless in fighting for his right to use the words he wanted to use, however explicit, and to address the subjects he wanted to address, however beyond the norms of the late-Victorian ...society he grew up in. Because of the strict laws governing obscenity in England and the United States, many publishers weren't willing to take the legal risk of printing works that could be deemed obscene. Because of all these difficulties, not to mention the great length of the work, the first edition of Ulysses was full of errors. ...the brilliant, insightful essays of Beach's partner in life and books (collected in The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier) illuminate the French side of her life.
