This association with Fitzgerald convinced the younger Hemingway to embark on his first novel ( The Sun Also Rises). “La Closerie des Lilas” around 1925.įitzgerald and Hemingway met in Paris shortly after Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby to critical acclaim. They flocked to Paris to innovate and commiserate together, often in cafés they helped make famous. A reputation that started when mid-1800’s artists broke away from classicism to usher in modern art. Those long, spare, and “true” sentences become Hemingway’s trademark, manifested in his ensuing œuvre.īy the early 1900’s Paris had cemented its reputation as a fertile haven for creativity. Written like a stream of consciousness novel, this book has clause upon clause strung up into one long sentence sometimes constituting one big paragraph. If Hemingway had a crystal ball, he would have realized Fitzgerald’s way was prophetic. It disturbed him to hear F Scott Fitzgerald confess to revising stories in order to sell them.

The preceding quote sums up Hemingway’s belief that writers must write the “true” and necessary sentence. He communed with other American writers living in 1920s Paris and eventually found his voice. From the first chapter, you sense that Paris is the feast for the eyes, ears, palate, and spirit the young writer needed to nurture his creative passion.

And reading about Paris in Paris? I’m hooked.Įssentially a memoire of Hemingway’s years as a young man searching for himself, A Moveable Feast couldn’t exist without Paris. The intriguing title was familiar, the first few pages beguiling. In a cramped studio w e rented when we first stayed in Paris a few months, a well-worn copy of A Moveable Feast lay on top of three or four books on a night table. “But what if it is … only that you are trying to use words that people would actually use? That are the only words that can make the story come true and that you must use them? You have to use them.”

A moveable feast book