"During the period of the second wave following World War II, new English-language periodicals appeared, two of which deserve special mention: The Paris Review and Merlin. The former, founded in 1952 under the editorship of George Plimpton, drew heavily on the expatriate community for its writers and its editorial staff. It emphasized the writings of European as well as American writers. Its ties to Paris diminished rapidly, however, after Plimpton returned to the United States in 1956 (where the magazine continues to flourish). Merlin, decidedly more experimental and avant-garde in content, proved more short-lived. Published in seven issues between 1952 and 1954, it was edited by Scottish expatriate Alexander Trocchi with the collaboration of a motley international group that included American Richard Seaver (a few years later to become editor of The Evergreen Review in New York), Englishman Christopher Logue, and South African Patrick Bowles. Merlin (and especially Seaver) did much to bring the recent work of Samuel Beckett to the attention of English-language readers. In 1953, they joined with Maurice Girodias and the new Olympia Press to publish a new series called the "Collection Merlin." The series would eventually include a distinguished list of titles, notably Beckett's novels Watt (1953) and Molloy (1955) and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955).
In addition to the publishers and periodicals, the English-language bookstores were an invaluable support to the expatriate community. After World War I and throughout the period of the first wave, the most important of them was unquestionably Sylvia Beach's famous Shakespeare and Company. Encouraged by her lifelong companion, Adrienne Monnier, owner of the bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres, Beach opened her own store in 1919 on the Left Bank. After a brief stay on the rue Dupuytren, she moved to a location across from the shop of Monnier on the rue de l'Odéon. Both a bookstore and a lending library, Shakespeare and Company quickly became a center of activity in the growing expatriate community. In addition to selling and lending books, the store served as the sales address and principal Paris distribution point for many of the local English-language publishers and periodicals. Beach befriended, advised, and lent books to countless expatriate writers, among them Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Robert McAlmon, who even used the shop as his mailing address. But Beach's most famous association was with James Joyce and the publication of his novel Ulysses. Employing the printing services of Maurice Darantière in Dijon, Beach published the first edition under the imprint of Shakespeare and Company in 1922. Throughout the 1920s, she published and served as distributor of nine of the first eleven printings or editions of the novel before Random House took over responsibility for new editions in the early 1930s. With the onset of the Depression and the decline in both expatriate and tourist numbers, the shop's business began to drop off. By 1937, the situation was so serious that Adrienne Monnier and some of her French friends established "Les Amis de Shakespeare and Company" to raise funds to allow the shop to survive. Beach attempted to stay on after the German occupation of Paris but finally closed her shop in late 1941 after a Nazi officer threatened to confiscate her books. She declined to reopen the shop after the war but did continue to lend books from her apartment to a new generation of expatriate writers, among them American Richard Wright.
The post-World War II wave of English-speaking expatriates was served by several new bookstores, the most important and longest surviving of which was Le Mistral, located on the Left Bank just across the river from Notre Dame. Founded by American George Whitman in 1951, the shop was later renamed Shakespeare and Company in memory of Sylvia Beach. In the tradition of Beach, Whitman not only sold books; he also lent them. His shop also provided a quiet and comfortable place for visitors to meet, talk, listen to readings, or just find a quiet corner to sit and read. The shop also served as a distribution point (and sometimes mailing address) for many of the locally published periodicals and books. In the late 1940s, Whitman was a close friend of fellow student and aspiring poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When the latter opened City Lights Bookstore, he modeled it very much after that of his Paris friend. Both stores remain open today and the two men continue to be good friends.
The second wave lost its momentum as the 1960s progressed. With the exception of Beckett, the more avant-garde writers began to go elsewhere, notably New York, San Francisco, and London. In 1968, the Olympia Press closed its doors in Paris and disappeared completely after a brief attempt to reopen in New York. The increasingly conventional atmosphere of Gaullist France after the collapse of the student revolt in 1968 (not to mention the rapidly rising cost of living) undermined the attractiveness of Paris to many of the younger avant-garde writers and artists. At the same time, conditions in other countries were becoming more appealing. The United States, for example, emerged from the repressive atmosphere of the McCarthy era of the early 1950s to see censorship go into decline with a number of important court victories (notably in the cases of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and William Burroughs's The Naked Lunch). With the civil rights movement, the Kennedy presidency, and the Vietnam War, the country experienced a period of great political and social upheaval and cultural vitality. Cities such as New York and San Francisco became the places to be. Young American writers and artists could begin to feel the same sort of artistic excitement and the same possibilities for freedom of expression at home that many had once sought abroad."
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