George Whitman, the founder of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, a famed writers’ refuge and English-language literary hub in the French capital, died Wednesday aged 98. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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“George Whitman died peacefully at home in the apartment above his bookshop,” the shop said on its Facebook page.
“George suffered a stroke two months ago, but showed incredible strength and determination up to the end, continuing to read every day in the company of his daughter, Sylvia, his friends and his cat and dog,” it said.
Across the Seine from the Notre Dame Cathedral in the famously literary Latin Quarter, Shakespeare and Company was known to generations in Paris as a haunt of aspiring writers.
Visiting authors and students would work in the shop, sleep in the stacks and soak up Paris’s literary atmosphere.
Whitman founded the shop as Le Mistral in 1951, later renaming it after the previous Shakespeare and Company owned by Sylvia Beach, which in the 1920s was a gathering place for writers including Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce.
“After a life entirely dedicated to books, authors and readers, George will be sorely missed by all his loved ones and by bibliophiles around the world who have read, written and stayed in his bookshop for over 60 years,” the shop said.
“George will be remembered for his free spirit, his eccentricity and his generosity — all three summarised in the Yeats verses written on the walls of his open, much-visited library: ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers / Lest they be angels in disguise’,” the shop said.
Born on December 12, 1913, Whitman, who claimed to be a grand-nephew of American poet Walt Whitman, was raised in Salem, Massachusetts, according to his biography on the shop’s website.
After graduating with a degree in journalism from Boston University in 1935, he set off on a 3,100-mile journey through Central America, much of it on foot, that instilled in him a passion for travel.
