A MOVEABLE FEAST

by Ernest Hemingway

"A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway
A memoir of Hemingway's early years as a struggling writer in Paris during the 1920s, offering a nostalgic and vivid portrayal of the city and its literary community.

158 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 22, 2024

About the author

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, including seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His writings have become classics of American literature; he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, while three of his novels, four short-story collections and three nonfiction works were published posthumously.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he spent six months as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded in 1918. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. He married Hadley Richardson in 1921, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.
He divorced Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had worked as a journalist and which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh Hemingway in London during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, in the 1930s and in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. On a 1954 trip to Africa, he was seriously injured in two plane accidents on successive days, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where, on July 2, 1961 (a couple weeks before his 62nd birthday), he killed himself using one of his shotguns.

Reviews

[Lisa Roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting vignettes

Having read The Paris Wife about Hadley Hemmingway I thought I'd delve in to a bit of her husband's writing. Hemmingway himself has never been of particular interest to me, I read Moveable Feast because I hoped to glean a little more about those early years and his first marriage. Some interesting glimpses into the people and places of those formative years , I particularly enjoyed the Fitzgerald references . Some observations raised a smile, Hemmingway is pithy with his prose, but I have no desire to read the novels, I'm not a huge fan of his terse blunt style and while acknowledging it is a stylistic choice I find the repetitive structures irritating rather than artistic . The influence of Gertrude Stein is all too apparent and I find her writing overrated and pretentious . Hemmingway is far less abstract ( thank goodness) and more prosaic , I am interested in these more journalistic pieces but would struggle with his more lengthy works.

[jennifer laughton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got to 41% and put it in my dnf. Couldn’t get into the book.

[Caoimhe O’Broin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few nice descriptions of Paris but overall found this very boring