A Moveable Feast
Published posthumously, Hemingway's recollection of his Paris years in the 1920s — the cafés, Stein's salon, Fitzgerald drunk in the rain — is the late-period prose he is most loved for. It is also a quiet act of revenge against several friends. Both things can be true.
Reviewers call the book catty rather than candid: Hemingway settles old scores against people who were kind to him at the time, and critics describe the maneuver plainly as “settling personal scores.” One reader dismisses the whole enterprise as “catty gossip penned with a prurient readership in mind.” The pattern readers keep noticing across chapters is repetitive by design, described by one as “take a drink, name drop, name drop again,” cafe sitting and racetrack gambling filling the gaps between marquee names. And plenty just find the man himself hard to like on the page, one reader summing him up flatly: “Ernest’s kind of a dick.” The staged poverty doesn’t help; his wife’s trust fund and a live-in maid sit awkwardly next to the broke-young-writer framing.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
