“Your friend if ever you had one”– The Letters of Sylvia Beach to James Joyce

This is the first-time publication of long-lost letters by a crucial figure in modernist publishing. Carefully edited and extensively contextualised, they document Beach’s unwavering, all-embracing support for Joyce’s art by publishing his controversial Ulysses in Paris in 1922 and other efforts such as getting fragments of Work in Progress published. They also reveal her difficulties with his uncompromising and demanding personality, as it is vividly illustrated in the Frankfurter Zeitung affair. The edition moreover includes all extant letters to Paul Léon, her successor after their break-up following severe disagreements over the American edition of Ulysses. Joyceans and scholars of modernism will find this an indispensable resource for further research.