Quicklet on Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (CliffNotes-like Summary)

Book excerpt: ABOUT THE BOOK I first read Hemingway’s posthumously-published memoir, A Moveable Feast (1964), when I was spending my junior year abroad studying at the University of Exeter in England, and I fell in love with the book. I think it appealed to me especially since I imagined myself to be -- like Hemingway and his friends -- an expatriate, at least for those nine months. It’s an exquisitely readable book, peppered with all sorts of literary figures I knew through English classes: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ford Madox Ford. There is nothing better for a young reader than to learn the secrets and hear the voices of writers known only through their novels, stories, and poems. A Moveable Feast brings them and the 1920s Parisian literary culture that surrounded them alive. MEET THE AUTHOR professional writer Vivian Wagner has wide-ranging interests, from technology and business to music and motorcycles. She writes features regularly for ECT News Network, and her work has also appeared in American Profile, Entrepreneur, Bluegrass Unlimited, and many other publications. She is also the author of Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel 2010). For more about her, visit her website at www.vivianwagner.net. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK A Moveable Feast is an episodic book, with short chapters devoted to various people, themes, and locations important to Hemingway during the period he and Hadley lived in Paris from 1921 to 1926. The book is roughly chronological, beginning when Hemingway and Hadley first arrive in Paris and ending when Hemingway has an affair and their marriage begins to fall apart. The book’s first chapter is called “A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel,” and it gives readers a first glimpse into the world that Hemingway inhabits. He describes how he’s writing about Michigan and his boyhood while being in the café, and the perspective he has in this opening scene encapsulates the expatriate perspective he has throughout the book: “I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold blowing day it was that sort of day in the story. Buy a copy to keep reading!