George Whitman is the proprietor of the acclaimed Shakespeare and Co bookstore in Paris, and is a former contemporary of such Beat poets as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He claims to be a grandson of American icon Walt Whitman, but others have queried this. He allows young travellers to stay in the residential quarters of his rue de la Bucherie premises, in exchange for two hours' work in the bookshop each day. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and although his exact age is undisclosed, he is known to have been born before 1915, and perhaps as early as 1910.

Whitman founded the bookstore in the 1950s, and named it after Sylvia Beach's earlier Paris bookstore "Shakespeare and Company". Whitman's store had a rocky history—he did not register or pay taxes for many years. Like many other artists in trouble with Internal Revenue, he was saved by André Malraux.