Shakespeare and Company

1919 Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company, the first combination English-language book shop and lending library in Paris. Beach befriended many of the world's writers, particularly in the 1920s and '30s, when her shop was a gathering place for expatriate writers and French authors pursuing new found interest in US literature. She also published the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses.

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.

Categories: american-literature, paris, france, literature