A Moveable Feast: Genre 1 key example

Hemingway reminisces about this time in his life as one of struggle and relentless optimism. Some of the chapters veer into other times and places. The chapter about "Scott and his Parisian Chauffeur," for instance, takes place in New Jersey and Pennsylvania after Hemingway has married his second wife, Pauline. Even though this chapter is not set in Paris, it is thematically relevant because it further develops Hemingway's portrait of one of the lasting relationships he formed during his Paris days.

Hemingway meets so many high-profile writers and artists while he is living in Paris that the book reads almost like a celebrity memoir or tell-all. Critics and fans alike have turned to A Moveable Feast to get an idea of what Paris was like in the 1920s, as a Hollywood-esque social and professional hub for famous creatives. The memoir allows readers to pry into the private lives not only of Hemingway and his wife, but also of people like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Hemingway, a modernist fiction writer who experimented with form, is also clear that there is not a totally firm boundary between his "nonfictional" memoir and one of his works of fiction. He admits that memory can play tricks on a person's perception of reality—this idea is important in modernism, and Hemingway only felt it more acutely as he got older. Additionally, he admits that he did not always keep journals at this time in his life for documentarian purposes so much as to practice his writing. One of the things he loved the most about Paris was the fact that it gave him ample inspiration to draw from in his stories. His journals, which became his source material for his own memoir, might be considered a creative bridge between real people and events and the fictional people and events of Hemingway's stories and novels. He took creative liberties when he wrote down the things that had happened to him.

A Moveable Feast may also be fairly categorized as an edited collection of essays. Hemingway was not the only person to edit, re-narrate, and collate his own writing to make this book. He died by suicide before he finished it or even gave it a title or chapter headings. His wife Mary pulled the project together under the title "A Moveable Feast" and published it three years after he died. In 2009, his grandson Seán and son Patrick released another "restored" edition that removed many of Mary's editorial choices and included yet more unfinished material. Many of the chapters that appear in both editions have few changes, but they are ordered and sometimes segmented differently. For all that Hemingway seems to have intended to turn his Paris journals into a cohesive narrative, the publication history reveals that A Moveable Feast is a collection of moving parts whose overall meaning is a little different depending on how they are put together.