If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
The famous quote that made Hemingway’s Paris memoirs famous (as if he wasn’t already famous enough being a Nobel prize winner) is one of the most used quotes from any writer ever. If we disregard books like the bible and the koran, only Shakespeare gets quoted more often.
Hemingway started to write on A Moveable Feast in the autumn of 1957, worked on it in Ketchum, Idaho in the winter of 1958 – 1959, took it with him to Spain when he went there in April 1959, and brought it back with him to Cuba and then to Ketchum late that fall. He finished the book in the spring of 1960 in Cuba, after having put it aside to write another book, The Dangerous Summer, about the violent “mano a mano” between two bullfighters in the bull rings of Spain in 1959. He made some revisions of this book in the fall of 1960 in Ketchum.
The book covers the years 1921 to 1926 when Hemingway lived in Paris. You should really pick up a copy and read it.