Beach, Sylvia Woodbridge

Beach, Sylvia Woodbridge (1887–1962) bookseller, publisher; born in Baltimore, Md. In 1919 she established the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, which became an avant-garde publishing house and mecca for American expatriates. In 1922 she published the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, which had been rejected by other publishers as pornographic. In 1941 she closed her bookstore in defiance of the German occupation and later she was interned for seven months. She never reopened the store but she was widely honored for her support of Joyce and other authors.