PARIS (AP) â€" George Whitman's life was packaged with a form of adventures that filled each indentation and corner of his bookshop, Paris' iconic English-language Shakespeare and Company.
A independent traveler, Whitman was once nursed to health by Mayans in a Yucatan during a 3,000-mile (5000-kilometer) trek opposite Latin America and infrequently bragged that he had lived in Greenland with a pleasing Eskimo woman.
At home, Whitman was best famous as a post of Paris' literary scene. For some-more than half century, his heterogeneous Left Bank emporium was a guide for readers, who spent prolonged hours browsing a superfluous shelves or curling adult with a good book subsequent to a indolent cat.
Shakespeare and Company was also a breakwater for each author or would-be author flitting by a City of Light.
For them, Whitman indifferent a acquire that incited Yeats' famous hymn â€" "Be not inhospitable to strangers / Lest they be angels in disguise" â€" into deed: He took in determined writers as boarders in sell for a assisting palm in a store.
Whitman died Wednesday in his unit above a bookstore, dual days after his 98th birthday and dual months after pang a stroke, a store announced on a website.
He "showed implausible strength and integrity adult to a end" and review each day with his daughter, his friends and his cat and dog, according to a statement. "Nicknamed a Don Quixote of a Latin Quarter, George will be remembered for his giveaway spirit, his oddity and his generosity."
The store was shuttered Wednesday, and longtime customers, students and unknown book-lovers illuminated candles on a bob to compensate their respects.
The store will live on underneath a government of Whitman's daughter, Sylvia Whitman. In an talk with The Associated Press progressing this year, she summed adult a singular store this way: "My father says it's a Socialist paradise masquerading as a bookstore."
Whitman was innate on Dec. 12, 1913, in East Orange, New Jersey, nonetheless he grew adult in Massachusetts.
His twin loves of a created word and unfamiliar transport were nurtured early on, when his father, a production highbrow who authored several scholarship books, took a family along for a yearlong sabbatical during a Chinese university in 1925.
That was a initial of a array of adventures that after saw Whitman ramble Latin America, cruise to Hawaii and join his approach opposite a United States.
After graduating from Boston University with a grade in broadcasting in 1935, Whitman enlisted in a U.S. Army. During World War II, he was lerned as a Medical Warrant Officer and treated a bleeding during hospitals opposite Europe, according to a store's statement.
Whitman altered to Paris henceforth underneath a GI Bill in 1948. Three years later, he founded his bookshop in a precarious aged building directly opposite a Seine River from Notre Dame cathedral. Initially baptized "Le Mistral" after a gasping winds that blow in off a Mediterranean, a shop's name was after changed.
The strange Shakespeare and Company bookstore came from mythological literary dame Sylvia Beach, and a place was a magnet for English-speaking expats like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She non-stop that store in a early 1920s in a Left Bank district not distant from a stream home, on a charity de l'Odeon. The emporium gained celebrity by edition Irish author James Joyce's criminialized book "Ulysses."
World War II forced it to close, and Whitman gave Shakespeare and Company a new life in new digs in 1951.
Over a decades, Whitman's retreat for literary souls from distant and far-reaching became a Paris institution. It's widely regarded as an respect for authors to give a reading during a store, where fervent listeners shove for a mark among a stacks of first, second- and thirdhand books backing a walls and floors.
Whitman was done an officer of humanities and letters by a French Culture Ministry in 2006.
He is to be buried in a city's princely Pere Lachaise cemetery, where a stays of literary giants including Oscar Wilde, Balzac and French producer Guillaume Apollinaire rest, a posting said. The date of a wake has not nonetheless been set.
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Associated Press author Elaine Ganley contributed to this report.
News referensi http://news.yahoo.com/founder-famouse-paris-bookstore-dies-98-204710478.html
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