In 1901, the family moved to France upon Sylvester Beach's appointment as assistant minister of the American Church in Paris and director of the American student center. Her father, a Presbyterian minister, was descended from several generations of clergymen, and her mother’s parents had been missionaries in India.

She disliked the name Nancy, and renamed herself Sylvia.

She was the second of three daughters born to Sylvester and Eleanor Beach in Baltimore, Maryland. Today, March 14, is the 129 th anniversary of the birth of Nancy Woodbridge Beach, who became Sylvia Beach ( 1887 – 1962). It was a society which was more tolerant of people of color and gays and lesbians, where being part of a bohemian subculture or having socialist political views weren’t regarded as suspiciously as they were stateside. In Paris, rents were cheap, alcohol was legal, and art and literature flourished. Toklas, Cole Porter, Man Ray, Josephine Baker and many others less famous who were disillusioned by America’s participation in a war that killed and wounded so many yet ultimately settled nothing the repression and censorship of the arts and the rising tide of violence at home caused by the Ku Klux Klan in the South and Prohibition-spawned organized crime in the cities. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. ' All of you young people who served in the war.you are all a lost generation.'īetween the World Wars, America’s “Lost Generation” flocked to Paris: F.

Sylvia beach memoir