Ernest Hemingway became a fiction writer in Paris in the early 1920s. We should understand such a statement to mean that the distinctive features of Hemingway's style and subject were catalyzed by his stay in Paris from December 1921 until 1927. He arrived as a newspaper reporter, and by the time he left he was one of the promising writers of his generation, having published the collection of short stories In Our Time and the novel The Sun Also Rises.
Many years later, Hemingway turned to writing about that time and place, which were so intimately connected to his apprenticeship. That work, which we might call autobiography or memoirs, was left unpublished at his death in 1961, to be brought out as A Moveable Feast in 1964 by his widow Mary.
While it may not be his best work, A Moveable Feast exhibits many of the features for which Hemingway is known: a controlled, understated use of language; short, simple sentences; some interesting repetitions of words and phrases; a keen assessment of character. The work can be profitably read on its own, but it is also interesting to read it in conjunction with In Our Time, or after one has read The Sun Also Rises, or simply if one is interested in the rich cultural and artistic communities in 1920s Paris.
Because it is so clearly set in a particular historical time and place, A Moveable Feast can present a challenge to the first-time reader, especially if that reader has a limited knowledge of the place of Paris in the Modernist movement, both in American art and in Europe. The definitive reference work for the book is Gerry Brenner's A Comprehensive Companion to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast: Annotation to Interpretation (Mellen Press, 2000).
What I have designed here is an on-line resource of Artists and some samples of their art, Writers and others associated with books and publishing, and a few basic Maps of the city and the Left Bank, in order that students can get more out of A Moveable Feast. From this page, I offer an "on-line seminar" which attempts to arrange the information in a meaningful way to provide background to the book for first-time readers. Please note that the arrangement of stories into "units" is strictly mine, for the ease of teaching/discussing, but there are some identifiable similarities between different chapters that suggest they are related.
Students should proceed through the "units", reading any material provided, reading the corresponding parts of A Moveable Feast, and then answering the study questions.