LJ241 Left Bank Lit: "A Moveable Feast," by Ernest Hemingway

Few works capture the time, place, and spirit of the Lost Generation on Paris’s Left Bank as vividly as Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

Written in the late 1950s and published posthumously in 1964, the memoir looks back on Hemingway’s years in 1920s Paris, when he was a struggling young writer surrounded by an extraordinary circle of expatriate artists and thinkers. Through spare, luminous prose, he evokes the cafés, the cold-water flats, and the creative ferment that defined that era. The book offers intimate portraits of figures such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and James Joyce, while also tracing Hemingway’s own artistic apprenticeship—his belief in discipline, simplicity, and the art of “getting the words right.”

Beneath the nostalgia runs a current of melancholy, a recognition that the friendships, marriages, and ideals of that generation were as fleeting as the Paris light he so loved. A Moveable Feast endures as both an elegy for a vanished world and a celebration of the creative energy that once made Paris the center of modernist life.