Maria Jolas was an important, if backstage, figure in the literary modernist movement in France and the USA. The wife and close collaborator of Eugene Jolas, she made significant contributions, as translator and editor, to transition, her husband’s highly influential little magazine. A lifelong friend of the Joyce family, Samuel Beckett, and Nathalie Sarraute, among others, she left a mark on the cultural currents of the time, and valuable correspondence. While her interrupted early career as a singer initially brought Jolas to Paris from her native USA, this city saw her develop as a woman of letters, a human rights activist, an innovative educator, and founder of the influential École Bilingue de Neuilly.