Beach, Sylvia

Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1887, Sylvia Beach was the second of three daughters of Eleanor Orbison Beach and the Reverend Sylvester Woodbridge Beach (Princeton Class of 1876), a pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton. She is best known for running the bookstore and lending library Shakespeare & Company and for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses .

With the help of Adrienne Monnier, owner of the bookshop La Maison des Amis des Livres, Beach opened Shakespeare & Company at at 8, Rue Dupuytren in Paris in 1919 as a bookshop, lending library, and occasional publisher specializing in English and American literature. In 1922 the shop moved to 12, Rue de l'Odéon, across the street from Monnier's establishment, where it remained until its closing in 1940. During two decades, Shakespeare & Company served as a meeting point for expatriate writers and American visitors to Paris. Beach was interned for six months during World War II, but although she managed to keep her inventory hidden in a vacant apartment nearby, she did not re-open the shop after the war.

Sylvia Beach chronicled her experiences with Shakespeare & Company and life in Paris between the wars in a memoir of the same title, Shakespeare and Company , which was published in 1956. Towards the end of her life, she was widely honored for her publication of Ulysses and her support of aspiring writers during the 1920s. She remained in Paris until her death in 1962. Her ashes were buried in the Beach family plot in Princeton, NJ.