Noël Riley Fitch

Who is Noël Riley Fitch?

Noël Riley Fitch is a biographer and historian of expatriate intellectuals in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. She is the author of several books on Paris as well as three biographies: Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian and French; Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin, published in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish, and nominated for the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle; and she is the first authorized biographer of Julia Child - Appetite for Life: the Biography of Julia Child. The Ernest Hemingway book, a biographical and geographical study of his Paris years, has been published in Dutch, the Cafés of Paris book in Dutch and German.

Fitch was born in 1937 in New Haven, Connecticut of New England parents and raised with two younger sisters in the Snake River Valley in Idaho. She has lived in Quincy, Massachusetts; in Pasadena, La Jolla and Los Angeles, California; and in Paris, France. Her writing career began when she was a columnist for her high school and college school papers; but it was in graduate school that she discovered the story of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop on the Left Bank of Paris and decided she would tell the story of Sylvia Beach, her bookshop Shakespeare and Company, and the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Since then every book Fitch has written has some connection with Paris and the artists who lived and worked there, including her biographies of Beach, Nin, and Child. In June 2011 Noel Riley Fitch was awarded the prestigious Prix de la Tour Montparnasse literary award in France for her book "Sylvia Beach: Une americaine `a Paris" [Perrin Publishers 2011], the French translation by Elizabeth Danger of Noel's widely acclaimed 1983 book "Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation"