A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway, 1964
★ 4.01 from 174.4k ratings on Goodreads
Hemingway's posthumous memoir of 1920s Paris: cheap oysters, cold wine, Cézanne in the Luxembourg, and the making of a writer. Paris comes across in sharp sensory details and a plain, remembering voice, moving in short scenes with a current of nostalgia and loss.
Feels like wonder, nostalgia and melancholy. About memory, art and power.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy memoirs of writing lives, 1920s Paris, and candid portraits of artists and friends. Some readers find the anecdotes gossipy and the memoir's framing unreliable, with dry stretches between the vivid scenes.
Why read it
It offers a close look at how a writer learns to see and work, and a vivid sense of a city and era that shaped him.
A page from the book
The cost of becoming conscious of your own gift.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless. What readers say
Readers often describe loving the Paris setting and nostalgic, sensory portrait of youthful poverty and literary friendships; many enjoy candid anecdotes about famous writers and reflections on craft. Some find it uneven, gossipy, or self-serving, with dry stretches and unreliable memoir framing.
Ernest Hemingway.Published in 1964, three years after Hemingway's suicide, A Moveable Feast was assembled from manuscripts he worked on in the early 1960s.
Books that feel like this
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The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway, 1952
An old Cuban fisherman, eighty-four days without a fish, rows out alone and hooks something enormous.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway, 1940
An American dynamiter has days to blow a mountain bridge and has just fallen in love, in a war where every stranger's death is your own.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is A Moveable Feast for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy memoirs of writing lives, 1920s Paris, and candid portraits of artists and friends. Some readers find the anecdotes gossipy and the memoir's framing unreliable, with dry stretches between the vivid scenes.
- What is A Moveable Feast like?
- Paris comes across in sharp sensory details and a plain, remembering voice, moving in short scenes with a current of nostalgia and loss. Feels like wonder, nostalgia and melancholy. About memory, art and power.
- What should I read after A Moveable Feast?
- If you liked A Moveable Feast, try Travels with Charley (John Steinbeck), Just Kids (Patti Smith) and Alistair Cooke's America (Alistair Cooke).
A taste of the feed
Every generation mistakes its childhood for a better world.
Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.
Travels with Charley · John Steinbeck
The summer history sped up and one woman wanted to stop it.
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
Just Kids · Patti Smith
What a lifetime of news looks like when it's recited in one breath.
During thirtyfive years as a foreign correspondent, I must have covered just about everything, from the public life of six Presidents to the private life of a burlesque stripper; from the black market in beef to the Black Panthers; from Estes Kefauver amid the snows of New Hampshire to Jack Nicklaus amid the azaleas of Augusta, Georgia; from Henry Kaiser’s Liberty ships to Francis Chichester’s Gypsy Moth sailing into Staten Island at one in the morning; from the Marshall Plan to Planned Parenthood; from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s last stand to the massacre of Muhammad Ali by Joe Frazier.
Alistair Cooke's America · Alistair Cooke
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