The greatest bookseller of all time: “Shakespeare and Company owns me”

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

George Whitman reopened Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris in the 1950s after the WWII Nazi occupation closed Sylvia Beach’s beloved store. In the Beach era, Shakespeare and Company had been a haven for the Lost Generation, and under Whitman’s guidance, it became a hub for Beat Generation writers like William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Whitman created an open-door policy for writers to sleep in his shop by night in return for their labor during store hours. He called them Tumbleweeds, and that tradition continues to this day. A few years ago, George retired, and handed over the reins to his daughter Sylvia Whitman. Last year, I took a trip to see George. He’d had a fall that morning, and Sylvia wasn’t sure if I should go up. But she checked in on him, returning with a vibrant smile, and led me up three flights of stairs and into his cozy room where George lay in bed. His bright sky-blue eyes instantly struck me — they were identical to his daughter’s — as did his sharp wit. The bookseller died a year ago today, at the age of 98. This is the last known interview with him.

George, what has it been like to own the world’s most famous bookshop?

When noir blew up!

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:03:00 +0000

WITH ITS ARTLESSLY PERFECT FIRST SENTENCE — "They threw me off the hay truck about noon" — James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice drew a line in the sand as defiant as any in literature since The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not unlike that novel, Postman forced an untamed populist voice onto more exalted cultural sensibilities; of course, nothing could be more American. Cain is a major figure of American fiction’s shadow pantheon, the one that includes not Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Steinbeck but Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Philip K. Dick, with Faulkner, Miller, and Pynchon wandering the demilitarized zone between. The most commercially successful of them, Cain was also the most spiritually bleak, finding his calling late and fast in the Depression’s depths after a fitful career as a journalist. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) was a sensation and scandal, at the other end of the bookshelf from The Grapes of Wrath (1939): Tom Joad may have been riding that hay truck too, but Frank Chambers is the one who got thrown off.

Salon.com > William Burroughs

The greatest bookseller of all time: “Shakespeare and Company owns me”

When noir blew up!