"Miss Beach's book is intimate not scholarly and thus full of interesting information. Her
reminiscences are literally an index of everybody in the twenties and she knew them all."
-Janet Flanner New Yorker Sylvia Beach was intimately acquainted with the expatriate and
visiting writers of the Lost Generation a label that she never accepted. Like moths of great
promise they were drawn to her well-lighted bookstore and warm hearth on the Left Bank.
Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James
Joyce Ernest Hemingway Scott Fitzgerald Sherwood Anderson Andre Gide Ezra Pound Gertrude
Stein Alice B. Toklas D. H. Lawrence and others already famous or soon to be. In his
introduction to this new edition James Laughlin recalls his friendship with Sylvia Beach. Like
her bookstore his publishing house New Directions is considered a cultural touchstone.