Noël Riley Fitch

Noël Riley Fitch
Noël Riley Fitch in Venice, Italy 2010
Born	1937 (age 79–80) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
Occupation	Writer
Notable works	Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child

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 (Literary Cafes of Paris, Walks in Hemingway’s Paris) as well as three biographies: Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983), translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Italian and French; Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin (1993), 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, with Appetite for Life: the Biography of Julia Child (1997). 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 (John E. Riley and Dorcas Tarr) 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 (1919–1942), and the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (the 1922 novel that would change world fiction). 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.