1. George Whitman was an American bookseller who lived most of his life in France.
12 Facts About George Whitman
1. 2.
George Whitman was the founder and proprietor of the second Shakespeare and Company, which was named after Sylvia Beach's celebrated original bookstore of the same name on Paris's Left Bank.
3.
George Whitman was a contemporary of writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin, and Lawrence Durrell, as well as a lifelong friend of the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
4.
George Whitman graduated with a degree in journalism from Boston University in 1935.
5.
George Whitman left the door to his tiny room in the Hotel de Suez unlocked, so anyone could come and read the books whether he was home or not.
6.
Beach, who visited George Whitman's bookstore, is said to have called his shop the "spiritual successor" to her own.
7.
George Whitman's shop opened just two years before his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights in San Francisco.
8.
George Whitman called these guests "Tumbleweeds" after the rootless plants that "blow in and out on the winds of chance", as he described.
9.
George Whitman was awarded the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, one of France's highest cultural honors.
10.
George 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.
11.
George Whitman died on December 14,2011, at age 98, at home in the apartment above his bookshop.
12.
George Whitman is buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in the east of Paris.