George Whitman

Bookstore

Whitman was raised in Salem, Massachusetts. When he was a boy, his family spent two years living in Nanjing, China, where Whitman’s father, Walter, had a guest professorship. This early adventured abroad established Whitman’s lifelong passion for travel and far-flung places.

After graduating with a degree in journalism from Boston University in 1935, Whitman struck out on what he called his “hobo adventures,” train-hopping, hitchhiking, and walking on foot through the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. It was the middle of the Great Depression, but wherever he went, Whitman said he was met with kindness and generosity. This experience would form the founding ethos of his bookstore: “Give what you can; take what you need.”

From 1940 to 1944, Whitman served in the U.S. Army. For the first two years, he was stationed at a remote weather post in Greenland, where he was a medical warrant officer. From 1943 to 1944, Whitman served in a hospital in Taunton, Massachusetts. There he also managed to open his first bookstore, the Taunton Book Lounge, “modeled on the great Paris salons,” as he wrote to a friend.

In August 1946, Whitman boarded a ship for Paris. Once there, he enrolled at the Sorbonne. Whitman traded his G.I. rations for other veterans’ book allowances, quickly amassing a large number of books. He left his apartment door unlocked, so anyone could come and read the books whether he was home or not.

With his own collection of one thousand books, Whitman opened his Paris bookstore in 1951 at 37 rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank. It was first called Le Mistral, but was later renamed Shakespeare and Company, after Sylvia Beach's earlier Paris bookstore (1919 to 1941). Beach, who visited Whitman’s bookstore, is said to have called his shop the “spiritual successor” to her own.

Whitman’s shop opened just two years before his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights in San Francisco. The two men had met in Paris in 1948.

Since 1951, when the shop opened, Whitman would invite travelers—usually aspiring writers, poets, and artists—to stay in the shop for free. In exchange, they were asked to help out around the bookstore, agree to read a book a day, and write a one-page autobiography for the shop’s archives. Whitman called these guests “Tumbleweeds” after the rootles plants that “blow in and out on the winds of chance,” as he described. On Sunday mornings, Whitman would traditionally cook his guests a pancake breakfast, brewing up a thin ersatz "syrup" out of some burnt sugar and water. Since 1951, an estimated 30,000 people have slept at Shakespeare and Company in beds found tucked among the shelves of books.

Whitman’s only child, Sylvia Whitman, was born in 1981. She now runs Shakespeare and Company with her partner, David Delannet.

George Whitman was awarded the Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, one of France's highest cultural honor.

Whitman was the subject of a documentary titled Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man by Gonzague Pichelin and Benjamin Sutherland broadcast on The Sundance Channel in fall 2005. At the end of the film, Whitman trimmed his hair using the flame of a candle, set his hair on fire, and then doused it.

On Wednesday, September 26, 2007, journalist Gerry Hadden's story on George Whitman, his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman, and Shakespeare and Company aired on NPR's The World (a co-production of the BBC, Public Radio International (PRI), and the Boston radio station WGBH).

Death

George Whitman died on December 14, 2011, at age 98, at home in the apartment above his bookshop. He is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in the east of Paris.