W.W. Norton
500 West Fifth Ave.
New York, New York 10110
Telephone: (800) 233-4830
Fax: (212) 869-0856
ISBN # 0-393-30231-8

Translations: German, Japanese, Spanish

Awards/honors:

Book of the Month Club/QPB
alternate

Finalist, best history 1983,
Los Angeles Times

Sixty years ago, Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company, the first American lending library and bookshop in Paris, published the novel that changed modern fiction: James Joyce's Ulysses. For eleven years she was Joyce's sole publisher, and for twenty-two years she ran the most famous bookshop in the world--the meeting place for Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Andre Gide, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder, Katherine Anne Porter, Janet Flanner, Samuel Beckett, Virgil Thomson, Harry Crosby, and Sherwood Anderson.

Based on ten years of research, with exclusive access to the Beach family papers, this is a true literary chronicle of the glittering twenties and thirties, rich in untold anecdotes about Joyce, Hemingway, and others. Professor Fitch has interviewed more than fifty persons and corresponded with dozens more.

This book fills in the important gaps in Beach's own memoirs, which are full of polite compliments and guarded half-truths. We learn the strange details of Beach's odyssey from a parsonage in Princeton to the Left Bank, the secret suicide of her mother, and the long, intimate relationship between Beach and Adrienne Monnier. For the first time, the author reveals the circumstances of the bitter break between Beach and Joyce.