Book SummaryA Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is a collection of vignettes of his time in Paris between 1921 and 1926. It tells the story of a young man of the “lost generation” of modernist writers and artists living and working in the interwar period. It brings us face to face with the literary giants like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as famous places like bookstore Shakespeare and Company and its proprietor Sylvia Beach, all of whom influenced Hemingway’s development as a writer.

Early Days in Paris

Paris seemed bleak when the winter rains came, and the small shops selling newspapers or herbs closed their doors. Hemingway lived in the hotel where French poet Paul Verlaine died, and it got cold in his apartment, which was somewhere between six and eight stories up, when the rains began. Hemingway often walked around the city, down the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain, past the Cluny Museum, and found a café on the Place St.-Michel where he would write. When the rains dissipated and the weather turned cold and clear, Paris became a different, more energized city. The bare trees in the Luxembourg Garden looked like sculptures. Even the stairs up to his apartment in the hotel didn’t feel so bothersome.

Hemingway usually wrote in his apartment, and he didn’t stop until he knew where his story was going, so he had something to write about the next day. However, occasionally he’d have writer’s block in trying to start something new, so he’d sit at the fire and just try to write one “true sentence.” Often, this took the form of a simple declarative statement that could begin a story. After writing a “true sentence,” he didn’t have any trouble continuing a story from there.

He also learned to stop thinking about writing after he’d quit for the day. This way, he could really listen to people and things around him for material he could use in his stories the next day. He felt good walking around Paris after a successful writing session.

Hemingway walked around the Luxembourg Gardens and viewed Impressionist works at the Musée du Luxembourg. Afterward, he sometimes visited novelist and poet Gertrude Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus, where she lived with a female companion. Stein was large but not particularly tall and had nice eyes as well as a German/Jewish face. Hemingway and his wife Hadley, whom he married in 1921, often visited the two women together, and they visited Hemingway’s place in turn.

Stein told Hemingway that she liked his stories, but while his writing was new and unique, he wasn’t good enough yet to be published in any big newspapers or magazines. Also, their sexual content made his stories unpublishable. Hemingway responded that he was trying to authentically reflect the way people talked, which Stein said was pointless if he couldn’t sell his work. Stein also contended Hemingway was part of a “lost generation”—those who had fought in the war and were now drinking themselves to death. This made Hemingway think about Stein’s own shortcomings on his walk home, and he wondered whether he was part of a lost generation or whether she was lost herself. He realized that all generations were lost in their own way—each affected by different things while growing up.

Life Around the Seine

Hemingway was too poor to buy books, so he rented them from Sylvia Beach at the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Even though Hemingway didn't have much money when he first visited Shakespeare and Company, Beach said he could rent books and pay when he was able. She also invited him and Hadley to dinner.

Hemingway went home with many books and told Hadley about his agreement with Beach. She said he was lucky to have found Shakespeare and Company and asked whether he could rent some Henry James books for her. Happy with the arrangement, they began to dream about a better, more stable life in Paris.

On clear winter days, many people walked along the banks of the Seine, which cuts through the middle of Paris. Hemingway walked to the Ile St.-Louis in the middle of the Seine, and then to the Ile de la Cité next to the Ile St.-Louis. At the bookstores in this neighborhood, he sometimes found just-published American books that were inexpensive. A proprietor explained that books in English were often bound cheaply, while French books were better made. Since the proprietors often didn’t speak English, they assumed all of the English books were cheap, and they often just threw them away.

Hemingway often walked to the edge of the Ile de la Cité and watched fishermen use long poles to catch fish. Open-air restaurants fried the fish whole, and they were delicious. When they had money, Hemingway and Hadley ate fish at La Pêche Miraculeuse (the miraculous peach).

Spring in Paris

With spring’s arrival, all problems evaporated. Hemingway wrote in the early morning before the shops opened. A goatherd came down the street and a woman walked outside and purchased goat’s milk. Hemingway never had much money, but he and Hadley didn’t think of themselves as poor—rather, they considered themselves intellectually superior and didn’t trust the rich. They were still able to eat and drink well, but cheaply, in Paris. Often, Hemingway and Hadley went to the races. They had some successes betting on horses, but they were still poor, and Hemingway was often hungry. However, he believed this cleared his mind and allowed him to focus on his writing.

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A Moveable Feast Summary Shortform Introduction

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast is a collection of vignettes about his time in Paris between 1921 and 1926. During those years, Hemingway took copious notes about his life. He forgot about them until 1956, when he learned he’d left them in a trunk in the basement of the Hôtel Ritz in Paris in 1930. Upon rediscovering the notes on his years in Paris, he set about writing what would become A Moveable Feast.

Hemingway worked on the memoir until 1960. He died in 1961, and it was published posthumously by his fourth wife, Mary Welsh...

A Moveable Feast Summary Part 1: Early Days in Paris

Café des Amateurs

Hemingway begins his memoir by describing how the rainy late fall and clear winter weather affected the mood and street life of Paris in the 1920s. The end of fall brought rain and cool weather to Paris. Residents shut the windows, wet leaves covered the ground, and the small shops selling newspapers or herbs closed their doors. Paris seemed bleak, and the Café des Amateurs on rue Mouffetard grew crowded. Patrons kept their distance from foul-smelling drunks while conversing with one another.

Hemingway lived in the hotel where French poet Paul Verlaine died, and in the winter, it got cold in his apartment, which was somewhere between six and eight stories up. He would walk around the city, down the Boulevard St.-Michel and the Boulevard St.-Germain, past the Cluny Museum, and find a café on the Place St.-Michel where he would write.

One day at the cafe, as Hemingway was writing a story about Michigan and thinking about how the cold and clear weather in Paris was similar to winter in the Midwest, an attractive woman entered. Hemingway knew that he needed to finish his work, so he buried himself in the story and in rum St. James. By the time he...

A Moveable Feast Summary Part 2: Modernist Novelists and Poets

Ford Madox Ford

Although he traveled in much the same circles as the English novelist Ford Madox Ford, Hemingway found him unpleasant. In this chapter, he describes an odd encounter with Ford.

Hemingway’s favorite café near his apartment in Paris was the Closerie des Lilas. He liked it because it didn’t attract patrons wishing to be seen—most people kept to themselves and were, Hemingway thought, academics. There weren’t many poets there.

As Hemingway sat in the cafe one day, Ford Madox Ford, the English novelist, joined him. Hemingway didn’t like Ford and tried to avoid him at social events, but Ford had stopped at his table to insist that Hemingway and his wife come to a club with him on the weekend. While they talked, a thin man walked by and Ford gave him a nasty look. He then reported to Hemingway that the man was Hilarie Belloc, a British/French writer. Hemingway didn’t understand why Ford had been rude to Belloc, as Hemingway would have liked to meet him.

Ford described Belloc as a cad and himself as a gentleman. Hemingway asked him if Ezra Pound, a mutual acquaintance, was a gentleman, and Ford said no because Pound was an American. Very few Americans were...

A Moveable Feast Summary Part 3: Friendship and Love

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald invited Hemingway and Hadley to have lunch with him and Zelda at their flat. The place was dark and depressing, and it didn’t look at all personalized, aside from some books and a ledger that Fitzgerald showed them listing all of his published stories and the amounts he’d been paid for them.

Zelda and Fitzgerald argued about drinking—Zelda was hungover, and she was annoyed that Fitzgerald had abstained from alcohol in order to focus on his writing. She was outwardly pleasant, but under the surface didn’t seem altogether happy at the lunch, which was not very tasty. But their daughter was cute and spoke in a cockney English accent because she had a nanny who did so.

Hemingway soon realized that Zelda was jealous of Scott’s writing—she tried to get him to drink so he couldn’t write; he tried to abstain so that he could. Scott was also jealous of Zelda, especially of her past relationships and the parties she went to. They both got drunk so often that Scott sometimes barely wrote at all.

Fitzgerald blamed Paris for his struggles to write and wanted Hemingway and Hadley to go out to the Riviera with them in the summer, as he thought...

Shortform Exercise: Find Your Own Paris

Try to think about an important place in your own life in the same way Hemingway thought about Paris.

If you are older than 25, remember where you spent your early 20s. If you are younger than 25, think about your childhood. If you were writing a memoir, what places would you be sure to include? Why?