The Letters of Sylvia Beach
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Founder of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company and the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, Sylvia Beach had a legendary facility for nurturing literary talent. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach's day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Friends and clients include 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, Beach carved out a unique space for herself in English and French letters.
This collection reveals Beach's charm 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 and Company afloat during the Depression; and her complicated affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier. These letters also recount Beach's childhood in New Jersey; her work in Serbia with the American Red Cross; her internment in a German prison camp; and her friendship with a new generation of expatriates in the 1950s and 1960s. Beach was the consummate American in Paris and a tireless champion of the avant-garde. Her warmth and wit made the Rue de l'Odéon the heart of modernist Paris.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A respectable and resourceful young American woman christened Nancy Woodbridge Beach (1887-1962) would become famous as the revolutionary publisher of Ulysses. and proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, the bohemian Left Bank lending-library and bookstore to the literary stars. Sylvia Beach left behind a trail of correspondence with major figures: Joyce, of course,and his ever-patient benefactor, Harriet Weaver; Gertrude Stein; Marianne Moore; Hemingway;the Fitzgeralds; Ezra Pound; William Carlos Williams; Richard Wright; and Alfred Knopf among them. Beach s most historically significant letter appears as an appendix a protest againstthe pirating of Ulysses by one Samuel Roth, signed by dozens of noted literati, from T.S. Eliot to Jose Ortega y Gasset, which created an international sensation and serves as a reminder of the centrality of intellectual proprietorship long before the Internet age. Letters about her falling out with the Joyce camp will be of interest to today s scholars. While overall, many of these letters are slight, others reveal the difficulties faced head on by this patron saint of independent booksellers who altered the course of expression in print. The footnotes and editing by Walsh, an assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College, are top-drawer. 30 photos.
