A Moveable Feast

I've been reading a lot of Hemingway lately, as well as biographies about him, so I really enjoyed reading A Moveable Feast for a book club.

A Moveable Feast is a 1964 memoir belles-lettres by American author Ernest Hemingway about his years as a struggling expat journalist and writer in Paris during the 1920s. 

In November 1956, Hemingway recovered two small steamer trunks that he had stored in March 1928 in the basement of the Hôtel Ritz Paris. The trunks contained notebooks he had filled during the 1920s. Having recovered his trunks, Hemingway had the notebooks transcribed, and then began working them up into the memoir that would eventually become A Moveable Feast.

The memoir was published posthumously in 1964, three years after Hemingway's death, by his fourth wife and widow, Mary Hemingway, based upon his original manuscripts and notes. An edition altered and revised by his grandson, Seán Hemingway, was published in 2009.

The book details Hemingway's first marriage to Hadley Richardson and his associations with other cultural figures of the Lost Generation in Interwar France.

The memoir consists of various personal accounts by Hemingway and involves many notable figures of the time, such as Sylvia Beach, Hilaire Belloc, Bror von Blixen-Finecke, Aleister Crowley, John Dos Passos, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Pascin, Ezra Pound, Evan Shipman, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Hermann von Wedderkop. The work also references the addresses of specific locations such as bars, cafes, and hotels, many of which can still be found in Paris today.

The title of A Moveable Feast (a play on words for the term used for a holy day for which the date is not fixed) was suggested by Hemingway's friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner, who remembered Hemingway using the term in 1950.

A Moveable Feast is a play on words for the term used for a holy day for which the date is not fixed.

I have always been curious about the phrase A Moveable Feast... and had long discussions about the origins of this term with a friend, so I was glad to find this last tidbit!