Tag: Lost Generation

The Lost Generation remains one of the most powerful symbols of American literature, even though the writing produced by this group was as much a product of Paris as anywhere else.

During my first trip to Paris, I took my initial pilgrimage to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore my first full day in town. Founded by Sylvia Beach, who is legendary in Lost Generation lore and rightly so because she coined the name that has since followed the group of writers. It is a not-to-miss stop for me every time I’m in town because it’s an opportunity to pay homage to Beach, who remains a tour-de-force in the history of literature. There’s a chapter in A Moveable Feast dedicated to the bookshop. It holds a poignant description of how poor Hemingway was during the time he had just let go of journalism in order to write fiction full-time.

“In those days there was no money to buy books,” he explained. “I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odéon.” He said of Beach, “No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.” That’s quite a statement, and this note Beach wrote to Bunny Wilson, which I found in his papers at Beinecke Library, proves what a champion she was for the writers who came across her radar.

His description of his first visit to her shop runs so counter to how we’ve come to think of him given all of the lore surrounding him, literary and otherwise: “I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished…There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 72 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one.” I present a number of angles about the Lost Generation here on The Diary of an Improvateur and they’re all filed under this tag.