A Moveable Feast

Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, this short book looks back to what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. A correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 — Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist forms; James Joyce had just completed Ulysses; and Gertude Stein held court at 27 rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of rue génération perdue. It was during these years that the yet-unpublished young writer gathered the material for The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed. Writing in a terse, stripped-down style, first as a reporter and then a novelist, Hemingway was an enormously influential author from the 1920s through the 50s, and won both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. J.D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac all acknowledged their indebtedness to him, as did non-authors like artist Edward Hopper, whose Nighthawks at the Diner was inspired in part by Hemingway's short stories.