George Whitman (December 12, 1913 – December 14, 2011) was an American bookseller who lived most of his life in France. He was the founder and proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, the celebrated English-language bookstore on Paris's Left Bank. He was a contemporary of writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell, as well as a lifelong friend of the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In 2006 he was awarded the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres medal by the French government for his contribution to the arts over the previous fifty years. Early life and education Whitman was born in East Orange, New Jersey, and grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. When he was a boy, his family spent two years living in Nanjing, China, where his physics professor father, Walter, had a guest professorship. This early adventure abroad established Whitman's lifelong passion for travel and far-flung places. He graduated with a degree in journalism from Boston University in 1935. Travels, military service, and first bookstore After graduation, 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 he said wherever he went, 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, he served in a hospital in Taunton, Massachusetts. While in Massachusetts during his military service, Whitman also managed to open his first bookstore, the Taunton Book Lounge, "modeled on the great Paris salons", as he wrote to a friend. Shakespeare and Company In August 1946, Whitman boarded a ship for Paris, to work in a camp for war orphans. When it disbanded, he enrolled at the Sorbonne to study French civilisation. He traded his G.I. rations for other veterans' book allowances, quickly amassing a large number of books. He 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. Lawrence Ferlinghetti remembered: "He was living in this little room, no windows and books stacked up