Yet to characterize Beach as merely a “midwife” and to remember her primarily for bringing into being the work of Great Men is to misrepresent her and the everyday work of her shop. Sylvia was one,” wrote Noël Riley Fitch, author of Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983), in the most recent introduction to a collection of Beach’s letters. “Certain people are meant to be midwives-not mothers of invention. Beach has thus been memorialized as the “midwife to Modernism.” Scott Fitzgerald who came to Paris during “Les Années Folles,” France’s version of the Roaring Twenties.
Beach then provided a home for expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and F. When James Joyce asked her, an amateur bookseller, to publish Ulysses, and she rose to the occasion, she underwent a transformation from an anonymous shopkeeper into an internationally famous figure. From there, Beach’s biography is often framed as a Cinderella story of Modernism. The origin story of the shop often goes as follows: during the 1920s, Sylvia Beach, a devoted enthusiast for the literary genius of her time, decided to set up shop a few steps from the Luxembourg Gardens. As we celebrate the centennial, the popular story of the shop’s founding is sure to be retold. One hundred years ago this month, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop opened its doors for the first time in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Sylvia Beach in front of her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, Paris, May 1, 1941
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