Al Laney, a native of Florida, was a reporter for the Dallas Dispatch, the Minneapolis News, and the New York Evening Mail before his move to Paris in 1924. There he spent most of the next decade on the staff of the Paris Herald (the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune ), while at the same time covering golf and tennis championships for its parent paper in New York. On the Paris Herald Laney was night editor, reporter, and rewrite man--"the all-round newsman," according to managing editor Eric Hawkins.

One of the many writers who frequented Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, Laney was recruited there to type business letters for James Joyce and later to read to him. Speaking to a Newsweek reporter in 1960, Laney recalled that Joyce "talked about the sound of words and the sound one word makes on another and the sound of...