This is a gorgeous biography from Hemingway that makes you feel as though you are living his life and feeling his burnout. Although there are highs, we really feel the lows. I most relate to his descriptions of conversations with acquaintances while he sits at a coffee shop. His relationship to his wife was also interesting. Having learned more about his life it becomes an even more depressing book. ( )

Having just read That Summer in Paris by Morley Callaghan, I thought it would be a good idea to read once again, Hemingway's memoir on the period he lived in Paris, just before Callaghan arrived to visit. It was a good idea.

I don't seem to have enjoyed the book that much the first time I read it (having given it only three stars), but this time I found it wonderful and didn't want to put it down. One of the things I was curious about was Hemingway's depiction of Scott Fitzgerald. Callaghan seemed to have gotten a very different view of Fitzgerald (and Zelda) than I remember in Hemingway's telling. And yes, the two describe two similar yet substantially different Fitzgeralds. So now the dilemma is who to believe. Hemingway knew the Fitzgeralds for many years. Callaghan was only there for a few months, the summer of 1929.

All that Hemingway describes in this book he does simply, often with as much or more dialogue than description. And the stories (or vignettes) are wonderful. Stories about the two waiters at the Closerie des Lilas who had to cut off their mustaches, Evan Shipman, Ralph Cheevers Dunning, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, and avalanches on the Austrian alps in Schruns. You love some of these people and dislike others. But they all seem very real and it's hard to imagine they weren't just as Hemingway says they were. And Fitzgerald too. ( )

Young Ernest Hemingway slums it in Paris along with other famous writers of his era, dispenses wisdom and funny anecdotes as well as biography of himself and others. Seeing Fitzgerald through his eyes as they wander about the Louvre looking at the cocks of greek statues to cheer him up from having been belittled by his harpy of a wife was laugh out loud funny. Hemingway is still guarded about his own failings, and it's more revealing in how he talks about himself than what he actually chooses to reveal. ( )

Good. ( )

What was the Lost Generation like? That was Gertrude Stein's term for Hemingway and his friends in Paris during I enjoyed reading Hemingways views of his friends in Paris in the 1920's. They were disullusioned by WWI, they had lost their identity and uncertianity of the times. War is terrible and they wanted a much simpler life.

I knew that I was reading some very slanted views on F. Scott Fitzgerald. But,in you read between the lines and think about Fitzgerald's life, you may see something different. He was passionate with love for Zelda and in my eyes, true, he may have been a hypochronic like me but, his life was truly tragic. I believe he was a great writer.

Hemingway often refers to the time that he knew Gertrude Stein very critically, she appears to be very strange to Hemingway in dress and her abundant criticism of others. Having a lot more monthan Hemingway, she advised him to invest in clothes or art. Accumulating a very impressive art collection and being painted by Picasso, when Hemingway said that he wanted to buy Picasso and could not afford him, she agreed "No, he is out of your range, you have to buy people of your own age.."(p. 26)

Hemingway lived in cold water flat in Paris and did not consider himself and his then wife, Hadley poor. But was often hungry. I liked getting to know who his favorite writers were, and agree with him on them on the most part.

An odd part of this book is about writinv in first. He found that when he did that, readers often thought that he was writing about his own experiences. He explains how that is not so.

In general, this book is chronologically disorganized, sometimes very biased but generally interesting to read. ( )