The Letters of Sylvia Beach

February 8, 2010
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.

February 15, 2010
"I have always loved books and their authors]," Beach writes in a letter to her longtime friend Marion Peter. This preference for "art" rather than "business or sport" inspired Beach to pursue a career as the proprietor of a "bookshop-lending library" in Paris, France, in the 1920s and 1930s. The bookshop she established, Shakespeare and Company, became famous as a "resort of writers" owing largely to Beach's charm, generosity, and intelligence. Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, were friends and patrons of Beach and her shop. Undoubtedly, the event that elevated Beach most dramatically among the literary intelligentsia of the period was her publication of "Ulysses" by James Joyce in 1922. As editor Walsh suggests in her helpful introduction, "]her role in bringing modernism's master work to the public meant that after 1922 her opinions commanded respect and her circle of influence grew." Walsh organizes the letters chronologically beginning in 1901 and ending in 1962, just months before Beach's death. Brief footnotes identify people mentioned in each letter with an occasional explanation of an event or situation. The letters reveal Beach's positive nature and her clever, witty persona. Her accounts of working for the Red Cross in Serbia during World War I, arranging to smuggle the banned "Ulysses" into the United States, and selling her beloved Joyce collection to the University of Buffalo provide details that allow readers to appreciate this interesting woman and her life. VERDICT Academics and students interested in literary culture, especially of writers of the Lost Generation, will find this book valuable.Kathryn R. Bartelt, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.