The fame of Sylvia Beach lies primarily in her bookshop and lending library, Shakespeare and Company, which she ran in Paris from 1919 through 1941. Most of the writers in this volume, and scores more, visited this bank, clubhouse, library, post office, publishing house, and center for Franco-Anglo-American literary exchange. The main single achievement of the bookshop was its publication in 1922 of the first complete edition of James Joyce's Ulysses. Beach remained Joyce's publisher for a decade. During this decade she published nine of the first eleven editions of Ulysses, as well as Joyce's Poems Penyeach (1927) and Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929).

Sylvia (Nancy) Woodbridge Beach was a product of, yet a rebel against, her Victorian upbringing. She was the second of three daughters born to Eleanor Orbison, the daughter of missionaries in India, and to Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, eight of nine generations of...