When the Nazis marched into Paris, Beach repeatedly refused to leave her books, although she was ordered to. My #1 destination would be Shakespeare & Co. Afterwards, her mother helped her finance a little bookshop in Paris, which had always been Beach’s dream, and over the next 2 decades, the shop became a smashing success, and a hub for all of the famous literary ex-pats in Paris at that time. She was the daughter of a minister, and during WWI, she served with the Red Cross in Serbia. reunion: James Jones, Sylvia Beach, Thornton Wilder, Alice B. She’s a huge figure in all of their memoirs. I’ve written a lot about Sylvia Beach, and I have known about her from my reading on all of the literary giants of the day. This small unassuming woman, born in Baltimore, grew up in New Jersey, was at the center of the literary event of the century. She got in big trouble for that, as books were confiscated at customs houses in England and America, and obscenity trials heated up over the next decade. would put the book out (her first foray into publishing – not too shabby, to start with Ulysses). When nobody would publish Joyce’s Ulysses because it was deemed obscene, far too hot to handle, she decided that Shakespeare & Co. You know, minor writers like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Sylvia Beach is one of my heroes due to her influential bookshop in Paris (Shakespeare & Co.), and her nurturing of the writers of that time.
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