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.