a portrait of people who lived life to the fullest, eating, drinking, gambling, traveling, reading, and ultimately creating a great body of literature that continues to set a standard of excellence to this day. Hemingway (20) wrote that "there were so many things to understand in those days," suggesting that from the perspective of several decades he saw his time in Paris as a period of relative innocence.
One of the most interesting parts of A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's (12) description of how he wrote: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. So finally I would write one true sentence and then go on from there." This approach to writing is seen by William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks (566) as allowing its author to always be "intensely at work upon the recalcitrant stuff of life." In other words, Wimsatt and Brooks (566) see all of Hemingway's work along with that of William Faulkner as representing an intensity of activity that directly addresses the meaning of life and, while not necessarily providing reportage, intermingling reality and subjectivity in a way that gets at the "stuff" of life in an effective manner.
Alfred Kazin (1) pointed out that Hemingway constantly used real people and situations in his fiction. Thus, much of Hemingway's short stories and novels are highly autobiographical. Kazin (2) states that "to a writer like Hemingway the effect of such detachment is not to make oneself powerless but, on the contrary, to be seized by the possibilities of a new subject - by the self as an aesthetic and dramatic unit." For example, Kazin (2) makes reference to the fact that while Hemingway did have friendships with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and references to these friendships and decline figure in A Moveable Feast, it is unlikely that the reader will get the real facts in this book. Kazin (2) says that the "book is too splendidly, too artfully wr...