De Beauvoir and Shakespeare & Co.

1935 French feminist and existentialist author, Simone de Beauvoir (1908 - 1986), joined the bookstore Shakespeare and Company, 12, rue de l'Odeon, Paris.


The shop's place in literary history is assured by its association (over two incarnations, with the second being owned by George Whitman) with such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas, Pablo Picasso, Baz le Tuff, TS Eliot, Paul Valèry, André Gide, James Joyce, Thornton Wilder, André Malraux, DH Lawrence, Aleister Crowley, Man Ray, Anäis Nin, Lawrence Durrell, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and many others.

The famous store was opened on November 17, 1919 by American expatriate publisher and daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Princeton, New Jersey, Sylvia Beach (1887 - 1962). It had become famous after it published Joyce's Ulysses in 1922, as a result of Joyce's inability to get an edition out in English-speaking countries (Joyce's insistence on correcting on the galley proofs nearly sent Beach bankrupt and he later double-crossed her by selling to Random House for what was then a huge sum of money -- $45,000 ).

Categories: paris, bohemian, beat, beatnik, shakespeare, feminist, beauvoir, joyce, ulysses, hemingway, english, literature, american, expatriate, expatriates