Beach was born Nancy Woodbridge Beach to Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, a Presbyterian minister in Bridgeton, New Jersey, and his wife Eleanor Orbison. Nancy changed her name to Sylvia when she was a teenager. At the birth of a third daughter, her mother stopped sleeping with her father and devoted her life to art and to the interests of her three daughters. Eventually, Sylvia fled the parsonage in Princeton for a career in Paris, where she lived during her impressionable teenage years, when her father had been an assistant pastor at the American Church.

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After traveling in Italy and Spain, and serving during World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, she settled permanently in Paris and founded the bookshop, Shakespeare and Company (1919-1941), a literary center for American expatriates. As its proprietor, she first published James Joyce's controversial novel Ulysses, which had been banned elsewhere because it was considered obscene.

Beach opened this first English-language lending library and bookshop in Paris on the Left Bank with the encouragement of her friend and lover, Adrienne Monnier, who owned La Maison des Amis des Livres. In 1921, Beach moved from her tiny shop at 8, rue Dupuytren to 12, rue de l'Odéon, across the street from Monnier's French bookshop. For two decades, they dominated French-Anglo-Irish-American literary relations.

Shakespeare and Company distributed a dozen expatriate little reviews, found publishers and translators, and offered readings by such literary figures as T. S. Eliot, Paul Valery, André Gide, and André Maurois. It was a clubhouse, bank, library, post office, publishing company, and confessional for two decades between the world wars.

Beach's greatest achievement was to publish a score of editions of James Joyce's Ulysses when it was available nowhere else in the world. She also published his Pomes Penyeach (1927) and Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929), essays analyzing Finnegans Wake, which had not yet been published.

Although Beach's name is connected to Ernest Hemingway, whom she called "my best customer," Robert McAlmon, and Ezra Pound as well as Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney, her closest associations were with the French. And her most intimate relations were with women.

There is no evidence that she was ever romantically involved with men. She had long friendships with a number of women, including the writer Bryher (Winnifred Ellerman, Hilda Doolittle's friend), but the love of her life was Monnier, with whom she lived from 1920 until 1936, when Monnier began a brief affair with another woman. Although from that time on Beach lived alone, the two women continued a devoted friendship, dining together every evening until Monnier's death in 1955.

The loyalty of her women friends was prodigious. Bryher financed the operation of Shakespeare and Company in the 1930s when the shop doors would have closed for lack of money.

Monnier and Beach translated essays and poetry, including T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," the first poem by Eliot completely translated into French. Beach assisted Monnier in editing her magazine Navire d'argent, and participated, with her, in editing Marguerite Caetani's Commerce, an international literary review.

Out of a sense of privacy bred in the parsonage, Beach did not talk openly of her love relationship with Monnier. In fact, both women were discreet, though not secretive, about their sexual relationship. Yet the example of their loyal and loving relationship speaks for itself. The strength of their union, their willingness to share difficult work, and the historical timing of their bookshops placed them in a position to influence the course of modern literature on two continents.

Despite the widespread homophobia in the Modernist movement, several of its practitioners were homosexual; some of them wrote openly about homosexuality, and the groundwork was laid for the gay liberation movement.

In addition to being the muse and inspiration of other writers, American expatriate Natalie Barney, known as the Amazon, was a poet, memoirist, and epigrammatist in her own right.

The bisexual poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle, who published under the initials H. D., wrote poems and autobiographical prose works that celebrate women's romantic relationships with each other.

Although Eliot tried to suppress the fact, The Waste Land is an elegy for a young Frenchman whom he met and loved in Paris and who died in the Great War in 1915.

Though she was an accomplished and respected photojournalist, Gisèle Freund is today best remembered as a chronicler of the vibrant bohemian community of artists and writers that made its home in Paris during the 1930s.

The network of independent gay and lesbian bookstores that arose in the 1970s served as incubators for the literary and cultural development of the modern gay rights movement in the United States and abroad.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

Ernest Hemingway, himself sexually insecure, included negative, even abusive portrayals of gay men in his fiction.

Poet, translator, literary and art critic, and short story writer, Edouard Roditi was associated with most of the twentieth-century's avant-garde literary movements from Surrealism to post-modernism.

In addition to becoming--with Alice B. Toklas--half of an iconic lesbian couple, Gertrude Stein was an important innovator and transformer of the English language.