Sylvia Beach

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Standard Name: Beach, Sylvia
Birth Name: Nancy Woodbridge Beach
Nickname: Sylvia
An American expatriate in Paris, SB played a key role in the emergence of literary modernism. She wrote important translations of landmark works of modernist literature, edited a collection of critical reviews and a retrospective anthology, and wrote a memoir about her life as the owner of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company . Before becoming a bookseller, she had aspirations of becoming a war journalist, but only one of her essays was published.
Black and white photograph of Sylvia Beach, seated at a desk, with a bookshelf behind her. She is turned, looking off to the side, and she is wearing a plain black dress with a white collar.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Bryher
From an early age, she fostered relationships with such innovative contemporaries as H. D. , Dorothy Richardson , Sylvia Beach , and Marianne Moore . In her life writings, Bryher places most importance on her...
death Harriet Shaw Weaver
Samuel Beckett , hearing of the news in Paris, remarked to Sylvia Beach : I . . . shall think of her when I think of goodness.
qtd. in
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking, 1970.
455
Having dedicated her life to English...
Family and Intimate relationships Jean Rhys
Later, in Sylvia Beach 's bookshop in Paris, she bought a book on psychoanalysis in an attempt to determine why her experiences with Mr Howard affected her so deeply. She would later write that she...
Friends, Associates Gertrude Stein
Over the years, the old crowd had begun to disperse and the Saturday evening salons were frequented more by writers and less by artists. Although GS had published only a few volumes and had often...
Friends, Associates Djuna Barnes
DB arrived in Paris with letters of introduction to Ezra Pound and James Joyce , and she soon came into contact with a great number of the US expatriates living there at this time, including...
Friends, Associates Natalie Clifford Barney
By the 1920s the salon attracted an impressive array of prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Paul Valéry , Colette , Jean Cocteau , Gabriele D'Annunzio , Rabindranath Tagore , Ernest Hemingway , F. Scott
Friends, Associates Edith Sitwell
In Paris ES frequented Sylvia Beach 's bookshop. She saw more than before of Gertrude Stein , whom she liked for her personal qualities but called the last writer whom any other writer in the...
Friends, Associates Bryher
Bryher met Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier , her future friends and collaborators, at Beach's Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company .
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton, 1983.
85
Friends, Associates Dorothy Richardson
The Montparnasse group with whom they visited included Ernest and Hadley Hemingway , Sylvia Beach , Mary Butts , Nancy Cunard , Cecil Maitland , Mina Loy , and Nina Hamnett . Richardson was disappointed...
Friends, Associates Bryher
Bryher was in some ways an anomaly in the expatriate literary society of Paris: she did not drink or enjoy a life of dissipation. But she loved to take an ancillary role with artists and...
Friends, Associates H. D.
In the 1920s, while HD and Bryher were living rootlessly, sometimes in London, sometimes in Europe, HD's list of acquaintances grew to include Gertrude Stein , Alice B. Toklas , Ernest Hemingway , James Joyce
Friends, Associates H. D.
HD's estrangement from Pound continued for years after the end of the Second World War. Then, despite the disapproval of friends such as Bryher and Sylvia Beach , she renewed contact with him in 1960...
Friends, Associates Anna Wickham
In ParisAW also met Sylvia Beach and Djuna Barnes , among others.
Hepburn, James, and Anna Wickham. “Preface”. The Writings of Anna Wickham, Free Woman and Poet, edited by Reginald Donald Smith and Reginald Donald Smith, Virago Press, 1984, p. xix - xxiii.
xxii
A brief encounter with Ezra Pound inspired the poem Song to Amidon.
Wickham, Anna. “Introduction”. Selected Poems, edited by David Garnett, Chatto and Windus, 1971, pp. 7-11.
10
Wickham also had a long-lasting friendship with Nina Hamnett .
Friends, Associates Dora Marsden
Marsden and Weaver also developed other significant literary and social relationships through each other. As editor of The Egoist, Marsden was chiefly responsible for the decision to serialize Joyce 's A Portrait of the...
Friends, Associates Harriet Shaw Weaver
HSW visited Paris with Bryher , H. D. , and Richard McAlmon . While there she met Sylvia Beach .
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking, 1970.
244

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Michaux, Henri. A Barbarian in Asia. Translator Beach, Sylvia, New Directions, 1949.
Beach, Sylvia. “A Museé Rodin in Paris”. International Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art.
Richardson, Dorothy, and Dorothy Richardson. “De la ponctuation”. Mesures, translated by. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier.
Beach, Sylvia, editor. “Introduction”. Les Années vingt: les écrivains Américains a Paris et leurs amis, Centre Culturel Américain, 1959, pp. 11-13.
Beach, Sylvia. “Inturned”. PMLA, edited by Keri Walsh and Keri Walsh, Vol.
124
, No. 3, pp. 939-46.
Eliot, T. S., and T. S. Eliot. “La chanson d’amour de J. Alfred Prufrock”. Le Navire d’argent, translated by. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Maison des amis des livres, 1925.
Whitman, Walt, and Walt Whitman. “La dix-huitième presidence!”. Le Navire d’argent, translated by. Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Maison des amis des livres.
Valéry, Paul, and Paul Valéry. “Literature”. Life and Letters Today, edited by Bryher, translated by. Sylvia Beach, 1932.
Beach, Sylvia, editor. Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Shakespeare and Company, 1929.
Bryher,. Paris 1900. Translators Beach, Sylvia and Adrienne Monnier, Maison des amis des livres, 1938.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace, 1959.
Beach, Sylvia. Ulysses in Paris. Harcourt, Brace, 1956.