The Letters of Sylvia Beach

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) has been called the patron saint of independent bookstores. Founder of the Left Bank's Shakespeare & Company in 1919 and first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), her facility for nurturing talent and promoting the avant-garde are legendary. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach's day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Beach's friends and clients included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Richard Wright. As librarian, publicist, publisher, and translator, she carved out a unique place at the crossroads of English and French letters.

This volume reveals Beach's wit and resourcefulness, sharing her negotiations with Marianne Moore to place Joyce's work in The Dial; her battle to curb the piracy of Ulysses in the United States; her struggle to keep Shakespeare & Company afloat during the Depression; and her long love affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier. The letters also illuminate Beach's childhood in Princeton, New Jersey, her work in Serbia for the American Red Cross, her internment in a German prison camp during the Second World War, and her friendships with a new expatriate generation in the 1950s and 1960s. The consummate American in Paris and a tireless champion of the avant-garde, through her letters, Beach provides a fresh window into the modernist movement.

The Barnes & Noble Review

My friend Manan Ahmed, a professor at Freie Universität in Berlin, is giving a lecture called "Situating a Universal: Liminal Sindh in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia." I am in the back, but my brain is in 1920s Paris, with Manan's maps of the 11th-century Middle East layered in the background. I have been gorging on the letters of Sylvia Beach and the memoirs of Margaret Anderson so when Manan pauses and asks, "What does it mean to situate yourself in the frontier?," instead of port cities and conquerors on horseback, I think of these two women, joined by a mad love for James Joyce's Ulysses, exploring the world of modernism and bringing its treasure to the empire's doorstep.

Because when Manan says "frontier," he means in opposition to the empire. To be in the frontier means to be in exile from the kingdom's purview, to hack through uncharted territory rather than walk the paved streets of the capital city. Both Beach and Anderson felt drawn to the world of letters, but lacking a smoldering desire to put pen to paper, and without an introductory letter that might lead to a publishing job, each planted her flag in her own plot of literary land. Anderson transformed herself from a small-town Indiana girl to founder and editor of the incomparable Little Review, the whole start-up funded by a friend's pawned wedding ring. Beach flung herself into the arms of Paris, after realizing she could never afford to open a bookstore in New York; with a small storefront, the help of fellow bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier, and one telegram to her mother -- "Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money" -- Shakespeare & Company was born. Anderson wrote in her memoirs that there was "something cosmic in the air, a feeling of worlds in the making."

Keri Walsh is assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.