Her Stories

- Documenting the Role of Women in Local History -

The 1920s were the great vintage years for American writers. There was a tremendous amount of talent in Paris then, and my shop seemed to be a gathering place for most of it. There were no tables and no drinks, but the people made it a hangout. It was a club without a name. The people knew each other only as The Crowd. Their idols were James Joyce and Ezra Pound . . .

These are the words of Sylvia Beach, a woman of Centre County stock who played a defining role in the development of twentieth century literature.

Sylvia Beach was the granddaughter of Nancy Orbison of Bellefonte, and a great-granddaughter of Ann Dunlop Harris. Harris is the woman credited with the naming of Bellefonte and is the author of a book on metaphysics entitled The Alphabet of Thought. Beach's father was Reverend Sylvester Beach, who was faculty member at the Bellefonte Academy. Following her father's appointment as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Beach was born in Baltimore in 1887. In 1901, when Rev. Beach was named the assistant to the pastor to the American Church in Paris, the family moved to France where they remained through Sylvia Beach's childhood.

Beach returned to Paris as an adult and in 1919 opened a Paris bookstore called Shakespeare and Company. The store became a creative and intellectual center for English-speaking writers such as Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. Beach made available a wide variety of services to her writer friends. She provided them a forum for introductions, found them typists, received their mail, critiqued their works in progress, and published their final products. She would serve these "regulars" tea in a back parlor of the shop that had a fireplace. Not only was Beach a very hospitable shop owner, but she was also a shrewd businesswoman. She is remembered as referring to books that didn't sell as "dead ones," and placed them in large boxes that she called "coffins."

Literary acclaim and fame found Sylvia Beach and her bookshop in 1922 when she took the bold step of publishing James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Joyce's masterpiece had been deemed too obscene to print. Beach offered to publish her friend's novel after they jointly discovered that, due to its controversial nature, there was no hope of it appearing in English-speaking countries. The first 1000 copies were printed in Dijon, France. Beach continued to distribute the novel as long as it remained a banned book in England and the United States. Beach also published Joyce's work Pomes Penyeach in 1927, and put out a volume of studies by contributors to his "Works in Progress." Eventually, the volume was integrated into Finnegan's Wake. Literary critics see her publication of Ulysses in 1922 as one of the great literary events of the twentieth century.

Shakespeare and Company operated successfully through the 1920s and early 1930s, but by 1936 the bookshop was facing hard times. Had it not been for the rallying force of her writer-friends Eliot, Hemingway, Gide, and Valery, Beach would have had to close the doors of Shakespeare and Company. They organized "Les Amis de Shakespeare and Co." and gave readings of their works to raise money for the shop. However, with the onset of World War II, the days of Shakespeare and Company were over. Beach closed the shop in 1941 and never reopened it.

Beach's 1959 memoir, Shakespeare and Company, provides a glimpse into the literary scene of Paris in the 1920s and her shop's crucial role in the cultivation of American literary expression in the twentieth century. She died in Paris in 1962. Her papers are in the Beach Collection at Princeton University.

Links:
Sylvia Beach Papers