The Real Shakespeare and Company

In my novel The Shadows of Havana, photographer Walker Evans steps into Shakespeare and Company with trepidation. He knows Sylvia Beach’s Parisian bookstore and lending library is steeped in literary history and wonders if he is worthy to cross its threshold.

The bookstore shown in the photo of me standing before Shakespeare and Company is NOT the original refuge of the Lost Generation that Evans visited. Yet hundreds still line up each day to browse shelves they believe were once touched by the hands of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce.

The first Shakespeare and Company opened in 1919, several blocks from its present site, and gained literary notoriety almost immediately. Beach’s most daring act came in 1922, when she published James Joyce’s Ulysses, then banned in Britain and America. Financing and managing the project herself, she established her shop as a beacon of literary freedom, securing Shakespeare and Company’s place in history. The store remained vital until the Nazi occupation forced its closure in 1941.

In 1951, George Whitman revived the name with his own bookshop. Today, Shakespeare and Company endures as a symbol of artistic courage, cultural exchange, and the golden age of literary Paris.